Funeral Consumers Alliance

This was sent 1/5/09 Commissioners: The funeral directors and embalmers associations have been very effective politically in guaranteeing that their services will remain the ONLY legally approved ones available to the public in most states. In the past they have gone on record to be against cremation and those practices that effectively deny them the huge profits they reap by selling expensive vaults, coffins, burial plots, and mausoleums with perpetual upkeep. With the popularity of cremations cutting into their profits they have sought to block any further erosion of their very lucrative economies. In the past the only way to avoid all the chemicals used to embalm and prepare the body for viewing was to claim a religious conflict which the Jews and some other religions used to preserve their customs. Your past ordinance (Nov.4, 2008) was nothing but an uninformed knee-jerk, scared-of-change reaction to an age old process that is beneficial ecologically and economically. Since Mr. Edwards is a minister, maybe he got his roles mixed up when he commented: "It just flies in the face of common sense to say it poses no hazard to residents," he said of natural burials. Could talking to snakes have caused him to forget that universal chemical embalming is a relatively recent practice? People and all living things have been dying and returning to the basic elements as the natural cycle of life has continued unabated for eons. Somehow, chemical embalming seems to fly in the face of common sense when natural burials are concerned. Just remember, it was the Catholic Church which forced Galileo to deny his scientifically gained physical evidence that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe nor even the solar system because the idea wasn't R.C. (Religiously Correct) When Jessica Mitford ('The American Way of Death') saw the pyramids she proclaimed: "Now there's a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control." Let's hope that doesn't happen here. human31204