In a column written just before it passed, Polly Toynbee writes:
The assisted dying bill’s final Commons vote today is no abstract debate about slippery slopes or what God wants: to do nothing is to inflict torture on many… Only God [some say] ordains the time of our entrances and exits. [But] his word cuts very little mustard in a country where 53% have no religion…
[The assertion that my position is a] ‘cult of death’? That sounds more applicable to those willing to let others die in painful agony…
[P]olling of those with disabilities shows 78% in favour [of] assisted dying, in line with the rest of the population…
No, as some hope, morphine is not a kindly drug wafting you away – it can’t remove all pain. Enough people have witnessed bad deaths that public opinion is strongly behind the right to die…
If it passes, it goes to the Lords, where 26 bishops will do their damnedest to stop it, reminding us why they should be removed along with the hereditaries.
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Well, it has passed, so cue the bishops… For UD, this issue is as clear a case as any that religion can really be a wild and crazy thing, peeling off penis parts and blanketing women in black and insisting that people dying in protracted agony must keep shrieking cuz the Lord who loves you also likes the sight of suffering or something.
Bizarre. Not just a minority opinion. Downright microscopic, since most people put basic humanity before dogma.