--- We agree! -- My life is mine to do with as I please, within the constitutional limits I agreed to as a citzen. I gave no government the power to tell me when, or how I could end my life, nor did my forefathers, the framers of the constitution.
Legal suicide, and particular the granting of power over one's life to another, is the alienation of one's right to life.
-- To whom is the life 'given'? Granting a doctor the legal power to assist me in my own death gives him no life. - Or any right to 'life' except for his own. -- You are simply attempting to cloak your religious opinion about suicide in legalistic language.
And, in fact, -- you can grant your life to save others, or your country, -- Many do in war. Others in peace. -- We call em heros.
"Unalienable" rights are rights that cannot be given away, and the exercise of which is not voluntary, but obligatory. The origin of the notion is in "unalienable" ownership of land -- land which the owner could not part with, whatever his wish to. What part of "unalienable right to life" don't you understand? If you find this to be "bafflegab" as well, let's just call it a day, and I wish you well.
I think I understand my rights, and have demonstrated that fact here. You have demonstrated a gift for gab, little else, --- save for a seeming desire to have government law control the 'moral' actions of your peers. -- Can you say this isn't so?
It is not legal to sell yourself into slavery in the United States. Why is this? It is because the ownership of a man by another is intrinsically inconsistent with the right to liberty. Our right to liberty is unalienable -- we don't have the right deliberately to give our claim to liberty away, to sell it, to barter it. It is unalienable.
Similarly, we do not have the right to place our own claim to life beyond our own power to assert that claim, which suicide rather plainly does -- we do not have the right to alienate our own right to life.
If you care to discuss this matter seriously, please be so kind as to indicate what you understand an unalienable right to be. The Declaration says -- although you may disagree -- that God has endowed us with rights we CANNOT separate from ourselves. They are unalienable. Divesting ourselves of capacity to live, to be free, or to pursue happiness, among other things, is to alienate from ourselves the rights that the Declaration says are unalienable by the will of God in His creative endowment.
I understand that you wish to interpret the Declaration as meaning that you have the right to dispose of your liberty and life as it pleases you. My point is that the Declaration rather plainly indicates that God did not just give us rights, he stuck them permanently to us -- we can't escape them. I do not see how you are taking any serious account of the unalienability of these rights. Are you?
I am aware of no situation in military or civilian life in which the death of an innocent person, soldier or otherwise, is the intention of a licit action. I know of no "hero" whom we understand to have deliberately sought death, or whom the government has acted as though it had the right to kill in the pursuit of any end. (I except, of course, manifestly illegitimate practices such as abortion, of which no serious moral defense is offered).
We could cheerfully disagree if you will simply acknowledge that the Declaration is not consistent with the right to suicide, but that you disagree with the Declaration on this point, even though the Declaration expresses the principles of legitimate American government.
Euthanasia laws, even when they require consent of the person to be killed, are exactly equivalent to laws permitting a man to sell himself into slavery. They are fundamentally perverse, because government exists to secure unalienable rights, not to facilitate the alienation of such rights.