Such a strange conceit we humans have, to actively remove our flesh from eligibility to benefit the biosphere that sustains us, even after death.

I wish I had a right to will that my body be tossed in the woods to keep the circle going after I expire, but I don't even think it's legal.

Read the 10th amendment and follow.

Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge of the law could explain to me how this passes muster under the Constitution. It seems to me that this clearly infringes on the states' right to regulate intrastate commerce.

@Shivver:
Brief answer: there's no such thing as intrastate commerce.
Long answer: Unless you can guarantee your establishment takes and gives no money from any individual or entity out of state, you're an interstate business. So either the cemeteries can only bury local folk with local dollars, make sure they never deal with an out of state insurance company and turn down any business that may require them to do either or else you do what the federal government tells you.
Fair? Original intent? Probably not, but that's the way it's ended up so that's the way it's going to be.

@dukegreene: It is, in some places, but you have to do some planning for it. Helpful first step (not sure if you can do this in all states): make friends with a sympathetic person who owns a lot of wild land. Or will yourself to a body farm. [en.wikipedia.org]

I've never understood our need to have ourselves pickled and placed in cushioned boxes.

Cemeteries should be highly regulated. Imagine if every bloody person got themselves buried. Now imagine 500 years from now. What's all our land doing? Holding a bunch of rocks that have withered away names that no one can read or see. Nothing but a few tattered pieces of plastic clothing and bone fragments remain. Yet we can't use that land. Just cremate or donate, its better for everyone.

Last I knew, cemeteries were already regulated, by states, counties, and municipalities. How exactly is extending federal regulation over them going to help, when in the case of Burr Oak at the very least, none of those multiple existing layers did the slightest bit of good?

Also ... isn't what the folks who ran Burr Oak did "fraud," in that they sold people what they believed to have been perpetual burial plots, which turned out not to have been perpetual at all? Fraud is already illegal (in the form of a civil tort, or possibly a crime) in every jurisdiction in the country. Do we really need additional federal regulations to outlaw something which is, essentially, already outlawed?

The answer isn't a raft of additional regulations and an extension of federal power. It is, instead, a more consistent application of existing regulations and laws. Put those who mismanage cemeteries ... and sell plots they aren't legally entitled to sell ... in jail.

Two words: soylent green

@SpruceStreetPhil: Most christian denominations object to being cremated. What do you propose they do?

@dohtem: let them look at reality, there is no space left with the rise in population.

@dukegreene: Please don't make the animals sick.

anyone remember that Atlanta crematorium without a working furnace, that was giving people quick-crete instead of cremains?

@Mr.DuckSauce: many religions object to being cremated. As what you're saying, I'm christian and have never heard anything about it.

If they don't want to be cremated then they can either be A) fed to the fishes, B) pickled for studies or C) blasted into outer space, I personally will opt for choice C just to possibly have the rare chance of scaring the crap out of an astronaut someday.

@PsiCop: Its true, they are heavily regulated, at least in California. I spent the last couple of years working for the family business making head stones. You wouldn't believe the crap the poor cemetery guys have to deal with.

And a high five for not needing additional layers of excess, useless regulation. Thats always the answer in recent times. Look at firearms laws nationwide for an awesome example.

@Jester6641: Short answer: The government doesn't pay attention to the Constitution.

@PsiCop: The point is the patchwork of regulations makes these laws difficult to enforce. Federal law trumps state and local law making some basic laws standard throughout the US, thus easier to learn and enforce.

@korin43: You are correct sir!

@Jester6641: Because in the aggregate, the combined operations of cemeteries and funeral homes have a strong impact on interstate commerce, thus bootstrapping it into federal jurisdiction. Its a pathetic endrun around the 10th amendment but it would likely stick.

@SpruceStreetPhil: Except that burials have been happening for thousands of years and there still appears to be useful land available... Give the existing graveyards 4-500 years and they'll be repurposed and few will be any the wiser.

@PsiCop: Most of the stories of cemeteries that rise to public consciousness are cases of bankruptcy/mismanagement, fraud or vandals. None of these would be helped through another level of bureaucracy.

@dohtem: Not that many do anymore. Most did until the 50s, but most are over it.

Christians are more commonly cremated in Europe than the US, but that's just a cultural thing.

@PsiCop: What's interesting to me is Illinois already has VERY stringent laws relating to cemeteries, as my town found out when they went to expand a library onto an ex-cemetery and had to do some exploratory archaeology because it used to be a cemetery, and found more than 500 bodies that were supposed to have been moved more than 100 years ago when they moved the cemetery TO KEEP THE BODIES FROM LEAKING INTO THE WATER.

Anyway, the rules relating to what they had to do and how they had to handle the bodies were EXTREMELY strict, so it's not like the Burr Oak cemetery was lacking in regulation. Just in common human decency.

But, hey, it gives Bobby Rush something to do.

This needs to pass in Iran! The Bahai's there have been persecuted since the beginning, and it still continues to this day:
[www.iranpresswatch.org]

@Shivver:Because the Commerce Clause is the general catchall for federal jurisdiction when there's nothing spelled out in the Constitution. Almost everything touches commerce in one way or another and that's the rationale.

You son of a bitch. You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the head stones. You only moved the head stones. Why? Why?

@PsiCop: I have to agree with you. I just can't see enacting federal jurisdiction over the cemetery business. What's next? Lemonade stands?

That said, the industry makes robocalling look saintly and might even make cash4gold look legitimate by comparison. My will appoints a taxidermist to stuff me and put me in front of the computer with a cigarette in my mouth and earphones on my head. No one will notice the difference.

@PsiCop: Yes, but a practical application of the already-extensive laws wouldn't give grandstanding congressmen the opportunity to Do Something(tm).

Well, obviously they're going to over-see it... how else will they get all the names of the dead people voting for incumbents?

@dukegreene: The parsis do it the best. They leave the bodies out for the vultures to take care of. Apparently you cannot go to heaven if your body is not torn apart by vultures.

I know that last part because the vultures disappeared from my hometown, and the biggest concern for the religious leaders was not "what of the corpses rotting in the sun" but "how will those rotting corpses get to heaven?".

@fantomesq: but we've never before had the same kind of population density as we do now. thats a big problem.

Big Brother isn't only watching you when you're alive.

@MostlyHarmless: I haven't heard of anything remotely that awesome. You just made my day.

@anonymousryan: Patchwork regulations are problematic when a business operates nationally or has national repercussions, but I don't see why it would be a problem for cemeteries, which are highly local entities. The people who should be in charge of enforcing cemetery regulations should be local and state regulators, who only need to know one set of laws, and if they fail then the harm is limited mostly to the state, so the states will be motivated to fix their own messes.

I'm also sort of worried about the added expense federal regulation will bring to the cemeteries, many of which are run as non-profits or as small businesses. Is the extra paperwork really necessary? What am I missing?

@bayank: and Baha'is are required to be buried (not cremated) locally (i.e. within a certain distance of where they die), so they're kind of stuck here; they can't "outsource" their burials outside of Iran.

@MostlyHarmless:
One word came to mind when I read this: "metal". Heaven through vulture savagery is definitely the most metal afterlife belief ever.

@diasdiem: This is the ONLY thing I ever think about when I read/write a post on cemetery misbehavior. I'm glad someone else went there too.

Bobby Rush is like 2 days away from being IN a cemetery. He's just protecting his own interests.

@SpruceStreetPhil: You can bury 3,600 people per acre, assuming you bury double depth like a national cemetery does. Let's say 500 million people die today (greater than the entire US population) and you bury ALL of them, which doesn't take in to account the roughly %38 cremation rate. It would take 138,888 acres to bury everyone, or roughly 217 square miles. So ramp that up to 8 billion people, and you have 3,472 square miles of pure burial space, 3 times the size of rhode island. BUT! That's not taking into account cremation. In the US, it averages out to about %38, and in other countries it is much much higher, as in closer to %100 percent.

So settle down. We aren't going to be swimming in corpses any time soon.

@lihtox: well, for one thing, many of the issues you hear about relating to cemeteries stem from the corporations that own them. SCI, Stewart, Stonemore and a few others own large cemeteries that remain quite busy, meaning many people use them. Having a set standard of cemetery regulations would benefit the consumer, because as much as many people would prefer to stick a ham bone up their ass and let the dog bury them, most people will have to encounter a cemetery in their lives, and it's best that they have a working knowledge of cemetery regulations. Remember, these corporations have taken what was once a very long term outlook business (you have to think generations down the road) and perverted it because they have short term considerations (how do we look this quarter to the shareholders.)

So anyway, a well codified national system of regulation for these assholes doesn't necessarily hurt my constitution loving, small government libertarian sensibilities.

@MichaelBrazell: nice! I can't believe there wasn't a pitchfork toting mob outside diebold's headquarters after this last one.

@Crim Law Geek: Some Hindu cultures believe that afterlife, no matter what your caste or where you stand on the good/evil scale, consists of blue demons tearing your soul apart for all eternity (once you're done reincarnating). This is a paraphrase of course.

It's kinda distrubing that we would need to have a rule in place for this kinda thing, some very sick people out there

@diasdiem: Yep. I was going to go there too. I always think of Poltergeist and the scene where she's trapped in the newly dug swimming pool with the bodies floating around her. Scared the shit outta me when I was a kid.

@MostlyHarmless: Sky Funerals sound amazing.

The main reason I want to be cremated is that I'd rather burn my body to ashes than have it go through the embalming practice. I would prefer to let myself rot in a casket, but apparently you can't do that without a lot of hooplah these days? It's ridiculous. Embalming is horrible.

@Laura Northrup: I think it's mostly a christian tradition to be buried in a casket and have your body ready for the rapture.

Other parts of the world prefer things like cremation to casket filling. Some christians think that this will not allow your body to reach heaven.

We do not need the federal government to run every aspect of our lives or death's.

@Yarrr: Damn right we won't be swimming in corpses, because Mayor West fills all caskets with concrete.

@MostlyHarmless: There's a sad story in a recent Harper's about that - Parsi burial in India is becoming a mess because so many of the vultures have fled or died. In addition to construction in expanding cities destroying their habitats, the birds were accidentally poisoned by arthritis medication the deceased had been taking.

From the article: "Bird watches began reporting that the vultures appeared lethargic. They fell from trees. During the 1990s, they population of three native vulture species declined by more than 97 percent. Not until 2003 did a veterinary researcher from the United States determine that the vultures were being poisoned by Diclofenac, a cheap drug introduced in India in the mid-1980s for the treatment of arthritis in humans and as a painkiller for animals. The carcasses of humans and animals that die soon after they have been given Diclofenac contain sufficient traces of the drug to cause kidney failure in the vultures that feed on them."

Sherally Munshi, the author of the piece, says that now Parsis leave the bodies in their traditional sites, but since there are no vultures, the bodies just rot and eventually get pulled out and buried. Sad. And a reminder of how complex ecosystems are.

@Laura Northrup: I've never understood it either. Jewish tradition is to use a simple shroud and simple box (so that you can't flaunt your wealth through burial), bury quickly (usually w/in 48 hours) and do nothing to prevent the body from returning to the soil. No preservatives, no metal in the box.