A lighthearted approach to death

No kidding. A new drama sympathetic to ‘Dr. Death’ is about to air on HBO.

‘You don’t know Jack.‘ They don’t know how much they don’t know.

A biopic of Dr. Jack Kevorkian that portrays the famous mass-murderer in a sympathetic light is set to air on HBO Saturday night. Known to many as “Dr. Death,” Kevorkian has admitted to murdering over 130 disabled, terminally ill, and healthy suicidal individuals…

Kevorkian was recently released from parole after serving over eight years in prison for the second-degree murder of 52-year-old Lou Gherig’s disease sufferer Thomas Youk. Although Kevorkian, 82, said in an interview last year that he was tempted to kill himself in prison, his lawyer talked him out of it; ironically, Kevorkian admitted that he would not have done the same in return.

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week, Kevorkian expressed satisfaction with the film, and affirmed that he was still willing to kill despairing people.

“I didn’t do it to end the life. I did it to end the suffering the patient is going through. The patient is obviously suffering. What’s a doctor supposed to do, turn his back?

What to say…

Pro-life activists are blasting the film as a whitewash of Kevorkian’s deeply disturbing career.

“The revisionist project to create a fictional Jack Kevorkian as merely a lovable, if sometimes tactless, man of compassion – rather the misanthropic and ghoulish nut that he really is – continues,” said bioethics commentator Wesley Smith on his Secondhand Smoke blog on Thursday. 

“To depict Kevorkian as merely idiosyncratic, you have to willfully refuse to report the full story in all of its macabre vividness,” wrote Smith. “And that is something the media has done now for nearly two decades. 

“But let us be clear: They don’t know Jack because they don’t want to know Jack.”