Gorsuch's shifty, deceptive logic on "cultural" issues

Jeffrey Rosen recently evaluated Neil Gorsuch's qualifications for the Supreme Court.

As discussed in Rosen's article, Attorney Gorsuch's logic about a human taking a human life contradicts itself:

His approach to the issue is ... “premised on the idea that all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

But:

Gorsuch stresses that “my argument, based on secular moral theory, is consistent with the common law and long-standing medical ethics” and he emphasizes that “I do not seek to address publicly authorized forms of killing like capital punishment and war.”

There is a hidden shift in the attorney's reasoning from "private persons" to public agents such as executioners and soldiers. But the physician operating under public physician-assisted suicide laws is no longer acting as a "private person."

Physician-assisted suicide laws "publicly authorize" the physician just as death penalty law publicly authorizes the hangman. Physician-assisted suicide laws are not conceptually different from the "long-standing" laws and ethics the attorney cites. They're just newer. Gorsuch's problem is the familiar conservative "cultural" hang up concerning change and the new.

Attorney Gorsuch's equivocation in secretly shifting between "private persons" and "publicly authorized" acts reveals either deductive incompetence or intentionally deceptive argument. If the constitutional sacredness of human life is not infringed by execution under color of law, it is not infringed by merciful assisted suicide under color of law. In either case, he does not meet the standards expected of a Supreme Court Justice. 

The candidate for Supreme Court Justice engaged in further misleading argument:

Gorsuch emphasizes, however, that “it remains to be seen whether [the Court might] … recognize a constitutional right that trumps at least some state legislation against assisted suicide.” And he suggests that he might be inclined to recognize such a right.

“Oregon’s decision to make a legal discrimination based on physical health (the terminally ill versus everyone else) seems a candidate for heightened review,” he argues, just like distinctions based on race or gender. “This [is] especially so given that Oregon’s law expressly implicates a fundamental right—that is, the scope of the right to life.”

Wouldn't such a constitutional right logically trump the death penalty as well?

 

Moreover, assisted suicide laws don't just "make a legal discrimination based on physical health." They further the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the patient by honoring their choice to end further pointless suffering. Here again, Gorsuch's argument is cleverly misleading. Does he have so little regard for the freedom of American citizens?