Editorial

The “Rosa Parks” of euthanasia is coming to Gainesville in October to proselytize for his cause at the invitation of a University of Florida student organization. But Jack Kevorkian is not coming just to spread his morally repugnant message of physician-assisted suicide. He’ll be paid $50,000 for his trouble.

Only days after being released from a Michigan prison on parole for his second-degree murder conviction of a man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, Accent, UF’s student speaker’s bureau, was the first to invite Kevorkian to speak about his immoral mission. According to Kevorkian’s attorney, the former pathologist has accepted the invitation and will earn the big payday—and it’s likely Kevorkian’s speech at UF will be his first, although other speaking requests are coming in.

Kevorkian is responsible for the deaths of at least 130 persons in his campaign to normalize physician-assisted suicide—a significant number of whom were not actually terminally ill, according to autopsies performed by the State of Michigan. As a condition of his parole, Kevorkian agreed to not “assist” any others, although he is permitted to advocate his cause. And, it’s young people whom Kevorkian wishes to reach.

“I want to talk to young people, high school and college, because I think the old ones have petrified minds,” Kevorkian told CNN’s Larry King three days after his release from prison.

Admitting that he knew physician-assisted suicide was illegal, Kevorkian told King he did it anyway for “the same reason Rosa Parks did it. She knew that was a right of hers. And, sir, I knew that this was a right of mine. These are natural rights.”

It demonstrates just how distorted this man’s mind is that he would compare his morbid example of civil disobedience to that of Rosa Parks, whose elegant and dignified resistance to an order to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 marked the beginning of the morally righteous effort to end racial segregation in America.

Kevorkian corrected King when he asked about his “killings,” preferring instead the term “medical procedures,” even though the American Medical Association officially opposes physician-assisted suicide.

Although he told King that his financial status was “comfortable” in spite of a 1999 settlement that awarded Michigan 90 percent of his wealth, Kevorkian’s attorney, Mayer Morganroth, defended the $50,000 speaking fee at UF and the other big paydays to come—for some as much as $100,000 per appearance, telling the Gainesville Sun the 79-year-old man has “got to somehow support himself.”

Kevorkian’s Oct. 11 speech is drawing criticism from Bobby Schindler, brother of Terri Schindler Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman who died in 2005 after her feeding tube was removed by court order. As head of the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, Schindler has begun a petition drive to UF president and the Student Government Association (of which Accent is a part) asking that the invitation to Kevorkian be rescinded.

“It is unacceptable for the University of Florida to give a platform to Jack Kevorkian, a man who willfully helped take people’s lives, some of whose only ailment was depression, and pay him $50,000 to spread his violent message of ‘mercy killing’ to the students of the University of Florida,” the petition asserts. The petition can be accessed online at http://tool.donation-net./TSSF/DrDeath.cfm?dn=1068&refer=2000.

Steve Blank, chairman of Accent, told the Sun the opposition of Schindler and others would “not at all” cause the Kevorkian invitation to be rescinded.

Accent, funded by student fees with an annual budget of $350,000, according to the Sun, claims to be the “largest, student-run, speaker’s bureau in the nation” and prides itself on bringing “controversial and influential speakers to the university, with the intent of further educating the student body, outside of the classroom, on current hot topics and controversies,” according to its Web site (http://sg.ufl.edu/accent).

Some of Accent’s controversial speakers have included liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, pornography star Ron Jeremy and conservative columnist Ann Coulter, the Sun reported.

Beth Waltrip, director of student activities at UF, told the Sun that the university wants to encourage “dialogue and exchange of information. … As a general philosophy from the university, we may or may not agree with the position (taken by the speaker) but we don’t want to suppress the conversation about it. We’re not going to suppress it because it may be a thorny position.”

In several media appearances Kevorkian has complained that nothing has changed on the physician-assisted suicide front during his eight years in prison, telling Larry King that Oregon’s law allowing “mercy killings” is not done “completely and right” because “a person who can’t swallow can’t get the service. Also, he has to be able to move his hand and arm to get the pill up to his mouth. Some can’t do that. Some can’t swallow. … Now, that’s not a medical service.”

The tragic reality is that things have indeed changed a great deal—and every step is closer to Dr. Death’s prescription of normalized physician-assisted suicide in America. There’s no doubt that Kevorkian’s radical campaign of death has played its part in slowly numbing Americans’ opposition to “mercy killings,” like that of Terri Schiavo.

According to his attorney, Kevorkian is the subject of adulation at his local grocery store. “They came over and some would say ‘our hero.’ … He is received unbelievably like an icon or statesman,” Morganroth told the Sun.

And now, the “hero,” the “Rosa Parks” of physician-assisted suicide, is coming to Florida, courtesy of the University of Florida.