Hi, ex-Texan! I think Gov. Bush cares very deeply about these developments. I just think he hasn't got the stomach for a full-blown constitutional crisis in Florida. Which is probably just what Florida needs right now -- its legal system is a snakepit, from the Supreme Court down to the circuit courts. It seems clear to me he has the statutory authority to act; but I doubt he will, at this point. If he did, can you imagine the stink the Left would raise? And they would not be addressing the valid constitutional issues involved, either; they'd just try to perform a character assassination -- on Gov. Bush and Christians in general -- and confuse everybody. They'd falsely claim that their "opponents" were trying to establish a theocracy....
At this point I don't expect the governor to act. I continue to pray for her nevertheless.
Death is not a right. It is a fact, but it is not a right. This is the flaw in the argument which has brought us to this point.
Doctors and hospitals exist in service to life, or they have no point. Its not difficult to observe what has happened in Holland, where the right to die has become entrenched. They have on paper a rather careful procedure by which the decision to die is worked out with the agreement of all parties, patient, doctors, family, and then reviewed by a committe.
In actual fact, the doctors have taken to making the decision on their own, without discussing it with anyone. If the doctor thinks you aren't a good candidate for treatment, you get the syringe with the cocktail in it, without even being told.
In a way, this has always been so, even here. Its too easy for a doctor to decide that it isn't worth continuing the fight, and to simply fail to order some treatment, or reassign a machine that the patient is dependent on. I've seen it done, they say its counterproductive to remain too long on a given treatment, and discontinue it knowing full well that without it the patient is dead.
Then they look solemn and say they did all they could.
But since the public presumption has been toward life, they had to at least go through the motions of trying to help.
Since the "right to die" has become vogue, the pressure now is on the patient to pull the plug on themselves, so as not to be any further burden to their families, and the doctors have been able to come out of the closet, so to speak. So now, if you don't explicitly demand to keep fighting, they may begin to withhold treatment, and if you do demand to fight on, they may quietly withhold treatment anyway.
Everyone understands that at some point some treatments make no further sense and its time to let go. When exactly that is has always been left in the gray areas of the law, between the families and the doctors. In trying to make the law explicit, though, life has been placed on the defensive.
If you have to ask for "extraordinary measures", then the very nature of the fight for life has already been transformed from a noble struggle to a pointless inconvenience. When food and water have been redefined as "extraordinary", we have crossed over into that Brave New World that was once just a writer's imagination.
I'm not afraid to die. If I am injured or ill, I don't want anyone to go to any "extraordinary measures" on my behalf, I want them to do their jobs, and to do them because life matters to them. I don't want to do a "living will" which is a roadmap for your own abandonment. I want to trust myself to people who care about me, who in turn will trust me to people who care about life, and between them I want to trust that they will do the right thing, without trying to define in advance what that might be.
When my death comes, I want it to be because its time, and not because someone has decided that I'm not worth the trouble.
If that makes any sense.