Thinking about Booth Gardner

This probably betrays a lot about me, but I'm too young to remember much about Booth Gardner's two terms as governor here in Washington. He's been in the news quite a bit in the last year, though, first as a staunch opponent of the WASL and now as a proponent of assisted suicide (registration required).

As someone who has Parkinson's Disease Gardner is more than qualified to talk about what the right to die would mean to him. It isn't something that I've thought much about beyond reading Sherwin Nuland's excellent book How We Die many years ago. The Oregon Assissted Suicide law was recently upheld by the Supreme Court, and we had a similar law pass in Washington years ago before it was overturned--I'll be curious to see if this campaign goes anywhere.