Posted on 03/27/2005 2:37:03 AM PST by mal
A couple of decades back, north of the border, it was discovered that some overzealous types in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been surreptitiously burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. The prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, shrugged off the controversy and blithely remarked that, if people were so upset by the Mounties illegally burning down barns, perhaps he'd make the burning of barns by Mounties legal. As the columnist George Jonas commented
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
My comment was meant somewhat sarcastically.
We presently classify "brain-dead" people as legally dead and harvest their organs for those who need them.
Classifying PSV people as legally dead is only another step down that road.
Whether we want to travel that road is a discussion we should be having. After all, there is obivously a spectrum running from full conciousness at one end to total brain death requiring respiratory support on the other. Perhaps it would be wise to discuss how we will deal with people at different points on this spectrum.
However, if we ARE going to put PSV people to death, I think it should be done in a quick, humane fashion, rather than pretending they die from natural causes.
I am a student of history and this state-sponsored killing of Terri Schindler shows me that we have not learned from history. Just because something is legal does not mean it is right. If we accept that, we are in danger of allowing our legalities to trump our humanity. The tribunal at Nuremberg recognized and affirmed this in their pronouncement of guilt on those German justices who likely knew of the wrongness of their laws, but nonetheless acquiesced in their enforcement, and thus opened the door to a wider holocaust, one of almost unimaginable proportions. That we are treading the same immoral ground today and few seem to care, or, worse, cheer it on, is profoundly disturbing to me.
However, once that finding has been made, under Florida law the rest follows perfectly naturally.
Her husband is designated as her next of kin. As such, he has the legal right to make medical decisions for her.
Your analysis has a serious omission. The law also has to find, to the standard of clear and convincing evidence, that Terri would choose to stop taking food and water to the point of death. I personally believe that the evidence does not support this legal conclusion.
Your have also mistated Florida law. Maybe it's an honest misunderstanding, or may it's deliberate misinformation. I don't know. But if you are honestly mistaken on your understanding, you will take the time to research Florida law, and back up your assertions with some citations.
The actual Florida law is at: Florida Statutes <-- Link
Before exercising the incapacitated patient's rights to select or decline health care, the proxy must comply with the provisions of ss. 765.205 and 765.305, except that a proxy's decision to withhold or withdraw life-prolonging procedures must be supported by clear and convincing evidence that the decision would have been the one the patient would have chosen had the patient been competent or, if there is no indication of what the patient would have chosen, that the decision is in the patient's best interest.
I do not disagree with your goals.
Demonstrating and protesting is entirely appropriate.
Expecting a judge to rewrite the reasonably clear law to comply with your wishes as to what it should say seems to me to be profoundly anti-conservative. It accepts the basic methods of the anti-Americans as justified.
IOW, those who promote their various liberal causes through the courts rather than the legislature are right to do so. There is nothing wrong with their methods, only with their goals.
I disagree strongly with this point of view.
BTW, what people forget is that hundreds or thousands of patients in similar condition are treated the same every year, and nobody pays a bit of attention. The only difference in this case is that one part of her family is opposed to the process.
Your explanation of the case is not accurate either. Greer found that TERRI would choose this path for herself. He took testimony from 5 witnesses on that point. The orders are phrased in terms of carrying out the patient's wishes.
There is an enormous difference between having your own wishes applied, compared with having the wishes of other applied.
Personally, I don't think the evidence that Terri would choose this course for herself meets the standard of clear and convincing.
The judge has ruled that the law you quote has been complied with.
So far, every state and federal appeals court has agreed with him. No offense intended, but I'll accept their rulings that the law is being applied correctly rather than your opinion that it is not.
The criticism aimed at the judges for not overturning a law passed by the legislature of Florida and signed by its governor seems to me highly inappropriate.
Perhaps you are right.
However, you are not the judge, who must make binding decisions which have so far been upheld through every single appeal.
He is right.
Also....a few questions to ponder regarding Terri.
***If Terri cannot swallow liquids, how is it she did not choke on her own saliva?
***If Terri can swallow, why was she denied water after her feeding tube was removed?
*** Why not Communion? A drop of the precious blood? What harm would that do?
***If Michael is honoring his promise to Terri. What about his promise he made to Terri in their marriage vows "in sickness and in health"?
Why is he commiting adultry for past 10 yrs not honoring that promise?
*** Why cremate her immediately if there is nothing to hide?
*** If she is not in pain, and so peaceful as Felos says, why not show the world?
I can tell that you haven't studied the case. Have a happy Easter!
Where is the factual error in the above statements?
I did not say the judge or the appeals courts had ruled correctly. I merely stated what decisions they had reached.
However, if we ARE going to put PSV people to death, I think it should be done in a quick, humane fashion, rather than pretending they die from natural causes.
$$$$$
This is exactly where the pro-death ghouls want to take American public opinion.
At any rate, I see where you are coming from, and don't want to come off as uncivil. I'm also not interested in discussing the case with you. Have a happy Easter!
We were discussing that earlier.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1371677/posts
What is disturbing to me about what this case illustrates is that we have drifted away from these founding principles. What we have here is an agency of the government no longer taking the role of safeguarding a fundamental right, but adjudicating whether or not this right applies to an individual who has been convicted of no capital crime. IOW, the government is placing itself in the position of granting the right of an innocent person to live. If this is so, then passing/changing laws in reference to those inalienable rights has no meaning, because we have lost the vision of what the true role of government, as envisioned by the founders, really is. An agency of the government then becomes the mechanism of granting a fundamental right. Individuals are no longer endowed with it from their beginning, and only by the whim of government to they retain it. Then, whether or not an individual, or group, lives or dies is no longer answered by appeal to inalienable rights. It simply becomes a question, as the Nazis showed, of who has more guns and bayonets.
Just as with abortion, once we cross the line and allow an outside agency to be the determiner of whether or not what has heretofore been regarded as an inalienable right applies to a particular individual, we have abrogated, as an operable legal and philosophical and moral principle, the entire concept of inalienable rights. The result, as history shows, can only be measureless destruction.
She was permitted last rites, IIRC. They've been trying to give her communion which ghouls Greer and Schiavo have been denying.
The only problem with what you say is that what is being done to Teri Schiavo has been routinely done for at least a decade. The only real difference is that part of her family opposes it and has succeeded in turning it into a media firestorm.
That is EXACTLY why we are in the position today where the GOVERNMENT can order a living breathing human being put to death by starvation/dehydration and almost 70% of our nation believes it is JUST FINE.
Absent clear and irrefutable proof of an individual's wishes (which is the case here, and I don't know how many other times, but whatever they are doesn't attest to the rightness or wrongness of the act), deciding on their behalf that they should die places our moral souls in mortal peril. Once you establish that principle as being morally acceptable, and once you choose death as being preferable to life, you open the door to unspeakable atrocities, all perpetrated in the name of "what's best".
By your reasoning the measure of life is the ability to end it.
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GOD Save the Vulnerable from the Bullies...
...and their Bully Judges.
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