Tuesday, January 15, 2008

One less choice

Even though the month is barely half over, I think it's safe to award the Capt. Fogg Finger of Speech award for January to our Supreme Court, otherwise known as the judicial branch of the Republican Party and guardian of corporate and religious interests.

Without giving any explanation of their reasoning, the court decided yesterday that you or I have no right to try unapproved drugs even if we are terminally ill and have nothing to lose. It seems to me that such rights belong to anyone if one is to maintain, in keeping with law and precedent, that we are free people who own our selves, our lives, our bodies. Upholding a lower court's ruling that
"Although terminally ill patients desperately need curative treatments ... their deaths can certainly be hastened by the use of a potentially toxic drug with no proven therapeutic benefit,"
the Bush Court under God got out the rubber stamp and used it to establish that, the ninth amendment notwithstanding, we have no fundamental right to self preservation; no fundamental right to make decisions or take actions regarding our self preservation that put no one else at risk. This ruling easily reduces to absurdity. Depending on prayer rather than penicillin can kill you, why do we not force the proven treatment and deny the unproven in this case?

Of course a doctor can sell you a gun or give it to you, I can buy rat poison without a license, I can use nicotine with a proven tendency to shorten my life, but not some drug that hasn't had years of testing and approval by the Government and yet offers some small degree of hope to me and no risk of harm to anyone else. Death can certainly be hastened by withholding a promising treatment and when death is otherwise inevitable, where is the justification, legal or moral, for black Robed Republicans to withhold hope?

Our guardians of the constitution have essentially removed one more right from a thinking adult that they would so dearly love to grant to a fertilized egg and so, amongst the vast throng of deserving applicants, I have to chose our Republican packed courts as the most worthy of the first monthly Fogg Finger of Speech.


5 comments:

Buffalo said...

Our rights and freedoms have been wrested from us, particularly by this administration, until the Constitution is little more than toilet paper.

Intellectual Insurgent said...

"Unapproved" drugs...

There's an Orwellian concept. Approved by whom?

Capt. Fogg said...

Approved by the FDA, apparently, but who knows who runs the FDA or any government agency any more?

The whole idea seems to have come a long way from a natural right of a person to freedom to freedom being a limited concept doled out grudgingly to us by authority.

Intellectual Insurgent said...

Big Pharma runs the FDA and the CDC. Shutting out "unapproved" drugs is the corporate equivalent of the mafia keeping competing products off the market.

Capt. Fogg said...

Well our government seems to be a kind of Mafia in more ways than this, but there's been this presumption that any rights we might have are there by the consent of the government, with permission of the government and subject to any infringements and revocations the government might feel expedient or amusing.

What was once stated to be "self evident" is no longer visible. We have become subjects rather than sovereign citizens in charge of our destiny.