New York officially joined the “Hey, if you’re sick enough we can help you die on purpose” club. yay?

State-sanctioned suicide is now a thing you can get like a Costco membership, only instead of bulk toilet paper you get a prescription that ends the membership permanently.

Dennis Poust, executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, pointed out that the whole “death with dignity” slogan is a marketing scam. Your dignity doesn’t evaporate the second your body starts acting like a 1998 Windows laptop. You still have it. The only things this law enhances are the culture’s general coarseness and the quarterly reports of insurance companies who’ve already done the math on how much cheaper a lethal dose is than actual care.

Poust notes the predictable sequel: Canada already ran this movie and the plot got darker every season. Started with terminal illness, then chronic illness, and then adding mental illness to the menu. By next summer tennis elbow will be cause for termination.

So now, when people in NY call a suicide hotline what will they get? Encouragement or a prescription? New York’s mixed messaging is “Suicide is a tragedy, except when we put a doctor’s signature on it.”

The bishops of New York already said the quiet part out loud last December: this is a grave moral evil, right up there with the other ways humans decide other humans don’t get to keep living. Catholic teaching still holds that life is sacred from the jump until natural death, and no amount of legislative euphemism changes that.

So the Bishops’ ask us all to pray for the sick, the depressed, the disabled, and the dying. And while you’re at it, pray that New Yorkers eventually reject the Culture of Death and remember what a Culture of Life actually looks like; the one that doesn’t treat suffering people as inventory that absolutely must go.

The New York State Catholic Conference will keep doing what it does: showing up in Albany to argue that social justice, respect for life, and the common good are not the same as handing out death certificates with a smile. God help us all.