DECENT FOLKS STILL FAVOR UPHOLDING THE LAW

The lessons learned about right, wrong, morality and penalties -- or lack of them -- for ignoring standards of decency have been tough to accept in these, the final years of the Clinton White House. While the nation's attention has been commandeered by the president's behavior and subsequent attempts to punish him, there have been other, more ordinary occasions when other, more ordinary Americans have risen to the challenge to uphold standards and adhere to the law.

One such occasion was the decision by a Michigan jury to convict Dr. Jack Kevorkian of second-degree murder for administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man. Kevorkian's so-called mercy killing was videotaped and later broadcast on CBS' "60 Minutes." If nothing else, the elaborate efforts by Kevorkian to flaunt his actions in the face of Michigan's murder laws demanded nothing less than charges and a trial.

In previous cases, Kevorkian has assisted terminally ill patients with their own suicides. By his own count, the doctor has taken part in 130 assisted suicides since 1990. He has been tried four times previously. Those cases resulted in three acquittals and one mistrial.

Those cases indicate a major shift in the standards Americans are willing to accept when it comes to the sticky and thorny issue of how to deal with individuals whose illnesses are about to end their lives and who wish to die on their own terms. But those desires must be weighed against laws that represent standards from an era that never thought the notion of killing yourself or each other was the way to deal with this situation. Neither, in previous decades, was medical science able to prolong life for so long regardless of the quality of that existence.

So the debate over euthanasia is far from over. But the Michigan jury held to the principle that laws are made to be observed. Juries don't make laws. They decide whether or not laws have been broken. In this case, the jury decided to convict, because that's the current law.

This same notion of adhering to the law was a key consideration on another recent occasion, this one involving a United Methodist minister in Illinois who has been suspended, thanks to a decision by a panel of his peers, because he blessed a "holy union" of two men. His action was in spite of a church law, adopted in 1996 and effective last August, that bans such unions.

But the minister, the Rev. Gregory Dell, has strong feelings about his ministry to gays. He said the decision to suspend him represents "a kind of moralistic rigidity and legalism that shuts people out." Sadly, Dell appears to be among those individuals who think it's OK to have laws, but if you don't agree with them, you don't have to obey them.

The ministers who sat in judgment of Dell had to decide whether upholding the denomination's ban on same-sex marriages was more important than accommodation of a fellow minister's compassionate effort to tend his flock. They chose to uphold the law.

In each of these instances -- Kevorkian's mercy killing and Dell's blessing of a gay marriage -- there will be much more debate and, possibly, changes in the laws, whether they are church laws or civil laws. In the meantime, however, there must be, in a society of laws, the recognition that laws are to be obeyed. Or changed.

Those who would seek to change laws by breaking them because the laws are deemed to be wrong are missing the point of why we have laws in the first place. Presidents who run for office, doctors who take up the healing arts and ministers who seek ordination all know what the rules are. Those who choose to make their own rules are, in short, choosing lawlessness over the very structures that make their politics, healing and ministries valid.