Kevorkian was ridiculed while he fought to legalize physician-assisted suicide. The media, stooping as it usually does to name-calling, fixed a particularly offensive label to Dr Kevorkian, which effectively obscured the importance, sanity, mercy, and compassion behind his cause. I won’t repeat the name here because it does harm every time it’s used, and even sympathetic writers and reporters seem unable to resist the impulse to mention it.

I admire Dr Kevorkian for standing up for what he believed in.  Judge Jessica Cooper’s decision to send him to jail was a travesty of justice. She claimed that the court is not the place to test a law.

We have the means and the methods to protest the laws with which we disagree. You can criticize the law, you can write or lecture about the law, you can speak to the media or petition the voters. But you cannot break the law.

Tell that to Rosa Parks, Judge Cooper.

(See more about euthanasia at Naked Singularity.)