Terri Schiavo is my hero! She is the only perfect person I know. She is incapable of evil. I'm sure she communes with the angels. Though she has been abused and neglected by the monsters, she is absolutely beautiful and regal. She is an amazing woman.
Representative Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) have just introduced the "Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act" (H.R. 1151, S. 539). If passed into law, this bill would make an immediate impact toward protecting the lives of people like Terri Schiavo, insuring that a disabled person's constitutional rights are not trampled, simply because that person is unable to speak for him- or herself.
With time running out for Terri, we must take immediate action to create a groundswell of support for this legislation.
Action Item #1--Contact Your New York Senators! Please call your U.S. senators and urge them to stand for those who cannot speak for themselves by co-sponsoring the "Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act" (S. 539).
+ + Action Item #2-- Contact Your Representative Today! After contacting each of your senators, take a few extra moments to contact your New York representative, urging him or her to give full and immediate support to the "Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act" (H.R. 1151). Make certain that your representative understands this bill will benefit those citizens who simply cannot fight for themselves. If you don't know who your New York representative is, call the Capitol Switchboard, and they will connect you quickly. Here is the number: 202-224-3121
You can also find your representative and his or her contact information by clicking here: http://www.reclaimamerica.org/contactCongress.asp?lk=house After you call, please let us know you
Many disabled people require feeding tubes in order to receive nourishment.
Food and Hydration are the basics to life, and should be classified as “Ordinary Care”
Catholic activist invokes spiritual power of the disabled
Friday, March 11, 2005
By Ann Rodgers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
When Mary Jane Owen was hospitalized with pneumonia, her doctor suggested that she decline antibiotics.
She was, after all, elderly, blind and used a wheelchair.
"He thought pneumonia would be such a wonderful way to die," said Owen, who fired him and continued her career as a disability activist.
"It lets me know how some doctors value my life."
It fueled her activism on behalf of Terry Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman whose parents are trying to stop her husband from disconnecting her feeding tube. She has also denounced the movie "Million Dollar Baby" for what she calls its unrealistic portrayal of the options after spinal injury.
Owen, who spoke last night at St. Paul Seminary in East Carnegie, formerly worked with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and has spoken at the Vatican. She is founder and national director of Disabled Catholics in Action.
Her criticisms of the Schiavo case are many. She cites affidavits from friends and nurses who swear that Schiavo recognizes them and can swallow unaided. Newly published research shows that when loved ones speak to someone in a "permanent vegetative state," there is activity in the parts of the brain that would respond in a normal person, she said.
The Oscars rewarded two films about killing disabled people. Owen has no quarrel with "The Sea Within," about a quadriplegic who campaigned for the right to assisted suicide, because it is a true story.
But "Million Dollar Baby" was a fantasy about a paralyzed boxer in a hospital where no one offered rehabilitation, where she rapidly developed bed sores so severe that her leg was amputated, and where the medical staff was indifferent, she said.
"It feeds into the most negative fears of people who don't know that much about disability anyway," she said.
"Not every person who is newly quadriplegic is going to want to work through rehabilitation, but at the very least they should get to know some people who have made that transition. This is an artful attempt to promote and normalize euthanasia."
Owen was not born disabled. The daughter of two Methodist ministers, she was teaching in the graduate school of social work at San Francisco State University in the 1960s and 1970s when she lost her eyesight. She quit teaching.
"I didn't realize what people with blindness could do. I didn't know anybody who was blind. That's the sad thing about disability. We often don't know the people who are successful," she said.
She had a poorly understood genetic condition, which 30 years later was unexpectedly cured by a cornea transplant undertaken solely to stop pain. Cumulative car accidents put her in a wheelchair in 1986. Surgery for an inner ear problem left her partially deaf.
In 1979, she joined the Carter administration as a consultant on disability issues, and eventually moved to church work. She was struck by how many disability activists are estranged from their faith. When she began asking if there was a Catholic theology of disability, she was told it was "the theology of the wounded Christ."
"I said, well that is probably why so many people who are disabled have fallen away. They don't identify with their brokenness as much as with what they can do. It dawned on me that the theology of disability should be the theology of resurrection," she said.
"So many of the saints have been disabled. I think they recognize the power of the soul or the spirit."
(Ann Rodgers can be reached at arodgers@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416.)
Liberals believe that something good makes everything else bad by comparison, and something bad makes everything else comparatively better.
It is entirely logical, then, that they oppose the execution of murderers while condoning the murder of innocent people.