The British debate doctor-assisted suicide, even while advocates try to hide what it is.

A hiss overwhelmed the room. We were on a stage at Lincoln Center. We were talking about Kansas. And if the audience walked in wanting me to be the enemy, I had just inadvertently confirmed I was. And all it took was a word.

The event was a documentary based on Thomas Franks’ bestseller, What’s the Matter with Kansas? And we had just watched a little of it profiling George Tiller, the late-term-abortion doctor who was murdered in 2009 on a Sunday in the church he regularly attended. It was a cruel, cowardly, evil act. I was the token pro-lifer on the Big Apple panel discussing all things Kansas, and, as far as those gathered were concerned, I had just played to type. I used the m-word. Murder.

Had you pointed this out to me, I would have, in all innocence, been bewildered by my offense. Fellow panelist Joe Conason, who wrote a column for Salon and was known to be close to Bill and Hillary Clinton, came to my defense. “She didn’t mean anything by it,” is what I recall him saying, sternly and chivalrously. I quickly learned that the proper word to use was “assassination,” because it had been a “political” murder. It was still a murder. It was evil. Evil seemed the most important thing to acknowledge: that the real battle was spiritual. Good and evil are things, and they insist that there must be truths that exist. We may not agree on what they are, but there are.

Can we at least agree? Murder is murder, and evil is evil.

I feel similarly in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The man is dead. He’s dead because he had the audacity — the fortitude — to go on college campuses and encourage young people to think and debate, make their arguments, instead of playing video games or victim. If you voted for Kamala Harris or otherwise weren’t a donor to Turning Point USA, I’m not going to hiss if you don’t use the a-word to describe what was done when Charlie Kirk’s life came to a violent, maddening, unnecessary end. It was evil. Say murder, say assassination. He didn’t die of natural causes. He didn’t die tragically from cancer at a young age. A shocking murder happened, and of a man doing the right thing: making his case. Doing what more of us should do.

A former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, is getting a nationwide hiss-like reaction for insisting that the assisted-suicide bill that the House of Commons passed this summer is about suicide. It is medically prescribed death. Some advocates of physician-assisted suicide are insisting that patients who ask for it aren’t actually suicidal. They are simply choosing death. They want to die because of a grave condition or an eating disorder or, in the case of Canada, homelessness. Our neighbors up north insist on calling it medical aid in dying. But it’s not that a doctor is providing a more comfortable pillow in your final hours, he is writing prescriptions and helping you end your life prematurely. I wonder whether those blasting May would prefer that just went ahead and called it murder rather than assisted suicide, as doctors are being recruited to do harm as a matter of protocol. I would easily go along with that classification, because it gets away from the lie that assisted suicide is mercy; it makes it clearer that it’s actually abandonment and elimination.

British actress Liz Carr hosts a BBC documentary warning that people with disabilities, a class that includes her, deserve to be treated as full human beings. She wears a necklace that asks: “Better off dead?” A comedian, she will make you smile — or laugh — before you think that she’s in the sort of monstrous pain that would be rectified only by putting her to sleep like you would a dog. The Devil wants us to believe we are beasts, nothing more than our base desires and usefulness. Assisted suicide buys into these lies.

And smart people do, too. Winston Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts, a member of the House of Lords, insisted in a recent speech that assisted suicide is the sophisticated — and conservative — way to go. Not to be too simplistic, but you don’t get to be conservative without something you are compelled to conserve. Is there anything more precious than a human life? And an innocent, vulnerable, weak human life at that?

Liz Carr isn’t better off dead. Your friend with advanced dementia isn’t either. Only God knows, quite literally, what miracles can happen when given time. That doesn’t mean Carr will be healed. It may mean that you will be. There may be reconciliations that happen at the peace of a hospital bedside, where nothing much can be done but loving in the awkward moment, and reflecting on life and love and what’s actually enduring.

So call it suicide. Or — don’t twist my arm — certainly murder would cover it, too, as the stronger equips the weak to die. Charlie Kirk was murdered. As was George Tiller. Both acts were wrong. They were both evil. Call them assassinations. That’s fine. Just don’t try to justify them or water them down. Evil was done. Let us unite in rallying against it. Period. Murder is murder. Medically assisted suicide is not only suicide, but murder. To pretend otherwise is to devalue life and justify evil. Even when it’s well-intentioned, it’s murder. It’s suicide. To not draw moral draw lines against these things is deadly — and to more than individual lives. Which, as it happens, would be more than enough reason. And a hiss wouldn’t begin to express the moral offense of the murder.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.