You people can sit in lala land and cling to the silly excuses you repeat to support your claims. I won't. We know plenty about how the brain works, it's well mapped.
What we don't know is how to fix it. We can't grow new neurons, folia, neuro pathways and reconnect parts of the brain, the lobes, so they can work again. Terri was brain dead, virtually every single part of her brain, the higher brain functioning centers were destroyed, disconnected.
Her body lived on auto functions which are located in the Medulla oblongata [brainstem]. She was dead Feb 25 1990, and her brain decayed, rotted away since that time, slowly replaced with cerebrospinal fluid, EIGHT TIMES the normal amount contained in a normal brain sack. her brain, or more accurately, that hollow shell, was 1/3, 1.35 lbs, compared to a normal brain weight, which is 3- 3-65 lbs.
It's important to note that the Autopsy report said it was 1/3 the weight, not size.
Your insults won't work on me; as noted above, they are used by people who don't have anything intelligent to say, or facts to back up their argument.
I have been reading your posts here and elsewhere and would suppose we have much in common. But, here you slip off track and dig up very worn axioms almost as if you come into the topic predisposed. You also call on your formidable knowledge about people who are in brain damaged condition and default to the side of the one who wanted Terri murdered and his band of evil henchmen.
Because of this, I can only suppose the anomaly in your otherwise conservative thought is attributed to some bad experience. Your techniques of insults and calling bad good and good bad is something we have seen over and over and with intentional distruptors. I am hoping in your case, it is not because you are reading talking points from your handlers like the ones you resemble.
Be careful when you point to your resume as proof you are right. Some of us, me included, have considerable more experience in working with people like Terri and whom we loved all along, and we understand and come down on the opposite fence as do you. Because we know better, we tend to find your attempts at clinical dehumanization to be laughable were it not so tragic.
You present nothing new only a scary side of your otherwise conservative makeup we all can see. Can you see it?
In the Name of Politics
By John C. Danforth
The New York Times
Wednesday 30 March 2005
St. Louis - By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.
Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.
Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.
High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.
In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.
It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.
I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.
The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.
When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.
Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.
During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.
But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.
The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.
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John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations. He is an Episcopal minister.
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