Posted on 03/29/2005 10:29:34 AM PST by dead
You're onto something. HIV and AIDs sufferers had better sit up and take note.
If not then why is this case different?
If my heart can't work for me then let me go.
Her heart was working just fine. All she needed was food and water.
That is all you need too.
In my opinion, leftist liberals that advocate for saving Terri Schiavo are nothing more than cowardly opportunists who are beginning to see the long-term (and hopefully irreversible) damage the recent litany of ghoulish Democrat excesses are having on their camp of killers with the average man and woman. They've been saddled with the worst elements of our post-modern culture of death, including pro-abortion, pro-homosexual (AIDS), pro-euthanasia, pro-human cloning, anti-religious, anti-property rights, anti-American, indeed, anti-anything that derives from a sense of true human compassion and respect for life and liberty. And this includes those who, after advancing the worst excesses of the loony left for so many generations, now appear to be on the sane and rational side. And I mean people like the Hildabeast, Jackson, and Frank (of all people). I wouldn't trust these "conversions" to be sincere any more than I'd trust a snake in the grass!
Nat Hentoff is one of the few liberals that I respect. He's like a sober Christopher Hitchens
You haven't paid attention. Hentoff, who is a fixture at the Village Voice is just about the only (and by far the most notable and loudest) anti-abortion voice on the left.
And after this sorry affair, he will be one of the few leftists who will still be able to credibly claim to speak on behalf of the downtrodden and those who have no voice (the only basis on which the left traditionally claimed moral superiority--since statism per se is amoral).
Maybe she did, but we have no way of knowing. We have the word of her parents and others in her family (the one she grew up in) saying that she would want to live, and the word of her adulterous husband saying she'd want to die. I know which one I'd be more likely to trust. And in any case, if there's doubt, then the assumption should always be that she'd want to live, unless someone can seriously make the case that she's suffering where she is now. I don't know if anyone's tried to make that case.
Her heart's been working fine, by the way. There was never any need to artificially pump blood through her. Same goes for her lungs.
Not Hentoff: he's always been solidly pro-life.
You kidding??? The world is really upside down today.
Nat Hentoff, who wrote the article, though a liberal, has been pro-life for decades now. I know, I remember as a young naive liberal being furious with his pro-life position on abortion; as were many Voice readers.
Nat Hentoff has long been a lonely pro-life voice among the hard left.
Nat has been pro-life for 20 years and has taken a lot of flack for it.
I had read quite a few weeks back that her doctor had recommended that they have that removed a long time ago, but it was not done. Why, I don't know, but if it would preclude an MRI or PET scan, it seems to me it could have been removed for that purpose, since it's not doing any good anyway.
susie
Yes, this is worth copying, pasting and circulating. Also worth a letter to the editor of the VOICE praising Hentoff so he can keep this op-ed venue open on the basis of reader demand.
Remember to use your libspeak lexicon: write it in simple Left-Feminese so it will be understood by their readership. An example follows:
(email to editor@villagevoice.com)
Dear Editor,
Nat Hentoff has raised troubling questions about discrimination in the Terri Schiavo case, as news stories have exhibited bias against her equal rights as a disabled woman.
Is the Terri Schiavo case about "quality" of life? It's surely about "equality" of life. It's about disability discrimination, a profit-oriented health care system, and a legal system that does not guarantee the equal protection of the law to people with no independent voice. It is about wives whose very lives are placed at the disposal of patriarchal husbands and haughty "stare decesis" courts.
A shocking number of news stories have exhibited a routine bias against Mrs. Schiavo as a disabled woman.
Her struggle is routinely and thoughtlessly tagged an "end of life"/ "right-to-die" case. Yet Terri Schiavo was an otherwise-healthy 41-year-old woman who was not (before her court-ordered starvation) at the "end" of her life and who had asserted no documentable "right to die."
She's branded "Persistent Vegetative State." Yet MRI and PET scans have never been done, and Terri even when weakened by severe hunger and thirst, struggles to communicate.
It's called a "family dispute." Yet her entire family has begged to be allowed to care for her; only her estranged husband, who repudiated their marriage years before, campaigned for a decade to see her dead.
Probably the most disgusting attitude toward Terri was exhibited by "spiritual"-oriented religious charlatans, who piously opined that she ought to be "allowed" to go "home to Jesus." As if a "life in the great hereafter" could erase the horror of judicial homicide.
Add Pinellas County to your files on Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
And thank God once more for atheists like Hentoff.
(signed)
And to you freepers, I go by....
Mrs. Don-o
Nat Hentoff has been writing about Terri Schiavo for a couple of years--a quick search of his name on FR produces two articles about her from November 2003. This isn't a fad or some media bandwagon for him.
George Felos, the lawyer for Michael Schiavo, recently told the news media that Terri Shiavo was serene and "resting comfortably." He said this towards the end of her agony engineered by the three men, Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer, and himself. What he did not say was that the only reason she was resting comfortably was because she was being administered morphine intravenously. But of course, it's nothing new for lawyers to misrepresent the facts to suit their purposes. His "resting comfortably", amounts to a "morphine drip" for American society so that we will also rest comfortably with what is going on here.
George Felos is a zealous proponent of euthanasia and it is no coincidence that Michael Schiavo contracted him to help kill Terri—contracted with the bulk of the money from the insurance settlement that was intended to help care for her. Hundreds of thousands of dollars intended for mercy now perversely going to this extremist lawyer. The mainstream media doesn't tell us this—another "morphine drip" so that we may "rest comfortably".
Michael Schiavo, we are told, is a loving husband who merely wants to follow Terri's wishes and mercifully end her long years of suffering. This is another "morphine drip". The main issue here is the real truth of Terri's wishes. There is enough doubt about Michael's actual character, his possible malevolent motivations, his credibility, and the deliberate bias of the first trial, that the US Congress directed the courts to start all over with a new trial at the Federal level. With this much doubt, the courts should always decide in favor of life. We give criminals this benefit of the doubt, why not innocent Terri Schiavo?
Why not? Because the third man in this case is "Genghis" Greer, the federal judge who imperiously gave Congress the back of his hand and ignored their directions. The media tells us that judges are supreme, objective and near infallible in their rulings—another "morphine drip" to help us "rest comfortably" under their benevolent rule. Perhaps Greer become weary of the case and decided to make it go away by his imperial decree. Evidently, he does not care at all about Terri Schiavo or the agony that his barbaric decisions have imposed upon her and her parents for the past 10 plus days. Is he the American version of the Nazi judges prosecuted in the waning days of the Nuremberg Trials? Those judges suppressed evidence, pursued their own twisted personal agendas, disregarded basic humanity, and were complicit in mass murder. "Genghis" Greer seems to be their modern day counterpart.
Meanwhile, the media, like George Felos, keeps us on a "morphine drip" of lies and half-truths. This started in 1973 when the imperial US Supreme court started us on a slippery slope with American Nazi death clinics for sexual convenience. Over 40 million children have been quietly murdered since then. Now we have slid down to euthanasia and the open murder of an innocent woman by a multi-day torture process. What's next on the ghoulish agenda? Who cares? Most Americans continue asleep and "resting comfortably".
Your post is so true. I was heartened when a friend who is so liberal (but I love her anyway!) on the phone asked me about this case, and I was amazed when she sounded almost more passionate than I describing how very wrong this was.
Someone somewhere said that God was holding a mirror up to our souls. Perhaps they were right.
susie
Excellent article. I emailed the Village Voice Editor:
Nat Hentoff's editorial on Terri Schiavo (Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder) accurately sums up the grim reality of this story. The lack of courage by our elected officials to take action to protect the life of this disabled, voiceless woman exposes them as frauds and empty suits. If they will not protect the least among us who will?
Terri Schiavo has been ordered to be put to death, exterminated, starved and dehydrated. They dare not call it euthanasia, they want us to believe that it is humane and "what Terri would have wanted". Many justify her killing with statements that "I wouldn't want to live that way". By this statement they are then justified in projecting this onto Terri, who never left a written clear directive stating that she would want to be starved and dehydrated.
The talking heads go on all the nightly news shows and tie it up in a nice package, complete with all of the appropriate experts (lawyers, doctors etc...) ready and willing to help us all feel better about murdering Terri Schiavo. Those who oppose it are 'right wing conservatives" or "Christian fanatics" or insert any other undesirable name that helps to make their case. When you don't like the message attack the messenger(s).
Why do they care so much about showing us how to properly view this humane killing? Maybe they hope it will help them sleep better at night.
I was stunned when I read the article. I was unprepared for the grasp of the underlying concerns of the issue from The Village Voice.
It's Nat Hentoff. He is consistently pro-life!
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