The Conservative Break-Up

Eutychus' Window ^ | 4/1/05 | Greg Alterton

[My2Cents]

With Terri Schindler-Schiavo’s death now literally yesterday’s news, I suppose much of the dust stirred up over the legal issues of her case will start to settle. Yet I find myself hoping it won’t.

Her case drew tremendous attention and stirred a lot of emotion because it involved questions of when life-supporting procedures should be terminated, what is an acceptable quality of life, what legal protections should be extended to someone whose condition has dipped below that “acceptable” level, and where are we as a society on the slippery slope which ultimately leads to genocide. These are not questions that have easy answers, but Terri’s case made us face them, particularly over the last two weeks. Sadly, I doubt that we as a people are close to forming consensus answers on these questions.

Aside from the gut-wrenching issue of euthanasia, the right-to-life versus the right-to-die, the principal issue surrounding Terri’s case the past two weeks has been the issue of justice, or rather, of injustice. In the minds of those of us who wished to see her ultimate death sentence averted there are questions and serious doubts about whether justice was done in her situation. We have the impression that the judge with original jurisdiction in Terri’s case, Judge George Greer, perpetrated a gross injustice by only accepting certain evidence and testimony which supported a pre-determined outcome; that he ignored and defiantly refused to consider other evidence and testimony which challenged or refuted his early findings and determinations; that he gave inordinate weight to the testimony of an active proponent of euthanasia while refusing to hear the testimony of objective physicians regarding Terri’s condition; that he also suppressed and prevented evidence from being released to the public (e.g., videotapes of Terri interacting with her parents); that he arbitrarily and capriciously took the side of death in her case rather than the side of life. There is the sense that while Terri’s case was indeed reviewed 19-or-whatever times, and by various appellate courts in Florida, that these courts simply rubber-stamped an original flawed decision by Judge Greer. In fact, there is a petition being currently being circulated calling for Judge Greer’s impeachment which cites 38 counts of judicial malfeasance on his part. There are also unanswered questions of Greer’s apparent conflict of interest in the case. George Felos, the attorney for Michael Schiavo, the advocate who expertly marched Terri off to death, was previously on the board of directors of the hospice where Terri was housed. When it was introduced in court that Felos held this position, and conflict of interest was charged, he resigned his position on the board. However, also on the hospice board is Judge Greer’s wife, and yet Greer refused to remove himself from the case due to that apparent conflict of interest. And over the past two weeks, after Congress passed a bill to extend jurisdiction in Terri’s case to the federal courts in order to conduct a full “de novo” review of all facts (including facts ignored by Greer), the federal judiciary had a hissy-fit and thumbed its collective nose at Congress, not, apparently, on the merits of the case, but on the basis of their offended sensibilities that Congress would dare dictate to the courts what cases they should consider. In short, the legal machinations surrounding Terri’s situation stink to high heaven.

In the face of apparent gross injustice, it’s been interesting to note who has been raising doubts about the abuse of justice in this case, and some of these key voices haven’t been from the right. Ralph Nader, for example, issued a statement on March 24 in which he said, “The court is imposing process over justice. After the first trial in this case, much evidence has been produced that should allow for a new trial—which was the point of the federal legislation. If this were a death penalty case, this evidence, this evidence would demand reconsideration. Yet, an innocent disabled woman is receiving less justice.” Others traditionally on the political left – notables such as Alan Derschowitz and Jesse Jackson – argued on behalf of life and justice in this case. In contrast, one of the disturbing aspects of the public debate over the past two weeks has been the response of many self-described conservatives. In the media, and also on Internet discussion boards, many “conservatives” have put legal process over principle, judicial supremacy over judicial responsibility, and states rights over human rights.

On one interactive blog, I had a self-identified conservative tell me that the Declaration of Independence (with its principle that every person is endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that any government which refuses to protect these rights, or which deliberately denies them, loses its legitimacy) has no “legal” standing in our nation; that the founding charter of our nation is irrelevant and non-binding in terms of the purpose of law and the concept of justice in this nation. In fact, he later admitted to me that he thought the Declaration of Independence was “illegal.”

The argument that congressional action to open up a federal path of appeal for the Schindlers violates “states rights” is an interesting and somewhat disturbing viewpoint. I don’t think I’ve really heard a similar defense of “states rights” since Brown vs. Board of Education superseded local laws permitting segregation in public schools, and since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 superseded state Jim Crow laws. The supremacy of basic human rights has always trumped “states rights,” at least since the Civil War.

Over the past two weeks I’ve seen evidence (from separate polls conducted by CBS and by Time Magazine) that the views of self-identified “conservative evangelical Christians” on Congress’ effort to open a new avenue of appeal for Terri’s parents weren’t any different than the general population’s (they're overwhelmingly opposed) – which leads me to wonder if there is any real distinction today between supposedly Bible-believing Christians and secular Americans within our society.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve heard self-identified conservatives say that people of faith were “ruining” the Republican Party, and that they should all be kicked out of the GOP. This despite the widely-accepted conclusion that about 4-million religious conservatives who sat out the 2000 election turned out to vote in 2004 for President Bush’s re-election, and were the ones who provided his 3.5 million-vote margin of victory. Prior to 1980, conservative Bible-believing fundamentalist and evangelical Christians shied away from politics. Their participation in elections was lower, percentage-wise, than the general population. With Ronald Reagan’s candidacy in 1980, religious conservatives came out of the cold and participated, contributing to Reagan’s landslide victory, thereby affecting an historic political realignment in American, and making “conservatism” the dominant political ideology in the nation. Any majority is, by its nature, a large tent. And the current Republican majority in the nation – reflected in majorities in both houses of Congress, possession of the White House, and a majority of governorships – is the product of pro-life conservatives, religious conservatives, secular pro-choice conservatives, economic conservatives, 2nd-Amendment conservatives, libertarian conservatives, neo-conservatives, paleo-conservatives, and every other brand of conservative, deciding to put their differences aside each election and uniting for the general good behind what they have in common. The majority status which conservatives enjoy is actually small, and it’s fragile. The debate around whether justice was done for Terri Schindler-Schiavo has revealed just how fragile that majority is, what with the secularist/pro-choice/economic conservatives telling the religious conservatives to take a hike. In this case, stupidity, emotion, and fallen humanity’s impulse toward self-destruction have apparently trumped pragmatic ideology and the basic issue of promoting justice.

Terri Schindler-Schiavo’s case, and the debate that has swirled around her court-ordered demise, raise not only questions about whether our courts are concerned with doing justice, but whether values – i.e., higher values than simply legalistic processes and abstract theories of separation of powers – characterize contemporary conservatism. In an increasingly secular society, I suppose it’s not surprising that conservatism itself has become more secular. Terri’s case has raised questions and doubts about the inherent justice of our justice system. And her case raises questions and doubts about whether conservatives give a rip about such things.

The issues and debate that swirled around Terri Schindler-Schiavo as her life literally dried up point to what many have suggested is a crack-up of the current conservative majority in this nation. At the very least, her situation and the questions of whether justice was done on her behalf are raising questions about what defines or characterizes a conservative. In a recent commentary by John Mark Reynolds, rebutting a recent column by Andrew Sullivan, Reynolds provides a definition of what it means to him to be a conservative:

"I am (at least) a sixth generation Republican. I don't need Andrew Sullivan to tell me what a conservative is. I believe in a role for tradition like Burke, heeding the wisdom of the past like Chesterton, that our rights come from the Creator like the Founding Fathers, and in a higher moral calling for our nation like Lincoln. I believe that man was created in the image of God as taught in the Bible and that a nation should err on the side of life like President Bush. I believe in the rule of law, but a law limited by the Law of Nature and Nature's God, like John Locke. I recognize the limited promise of government in this age and view a theocracy as wicked like Augustine, Dante, and Calvin. However, I more deeply fear godless secularism seizing our state and bringing on a reign of terror as it always does, just like Ronald Reagan."

It seems to me that over the past two weeks, some of those wheels have come off the cart.