Posted on 03/29/2005 6:22:07 PM PST by goldstategop
RUSH: To Baltimore, we'll start with Paul today. Welcome, sir, and hi. You're on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Good. Never better, sir.
CALLER: You're going to need to take some blood pressure medicine. You're really on a roll today.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: (Laughing.) My only comment is that, you know, I'm horrified by what's happening in Florida with Terri Schiavo, but --
RUSH: Oh, yeah, "But..."
CALLER: The courts have ruled, and the decision has been made according to Florida law--
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: --and it's time to stop 11 days of ranting about it. I mean, it's going to go where it's going to go.
RUSH: Paul, I appreciate your comments. But, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to have to say something I've been saying the last two days, and it's not my fault. I've just spoken to somebody else who hasn't been listening to the program, because if you had -- you said I've been ranting for 11 days -- you would have heard what I said yesterday about this. When this woman dies is not the end of this. There are much larger issues at stake here. What happens next? What does this facilitate, Paul? What's going to become easier after this? Some people think that this is so abhorrent that we're never going to go this direction again. Other people think, "Oh, no, Rush! This is the slippery slope now. We've just greased it, and pretty soon we're going to be down the road." National Review Online today has a piece by Wesley Smith, and he's a lawyer and he had an exchange with a bioethicist, and this bioethicist, pretty representative of the bioethics community, and they have a term that they're talking now about describing various stages of humanity, and in Terri Schiavo's case, she does not have "personhood" because she does not have conscious awareness. Now, you may think, "Well, that sounds pretty right, Rush. Why you disagree with that for?" Because, folks, there are a lot of us who happen to think that human life itself is a moral entitlement to live. Humanity itself is a moral entitlement to life.
If some people are going to sit around and say, "Well, that person's not a person because they don't know what's going on. I mean, you've seen the videos. She doesn't even know these looking at a balloon. She's just a vegetable. These people are expendable. We don't have the money to pay for these people. We don't have the time to worry about it. Their lives are useless and worthless. They don't have personhood." This is an up-and-coming view. So Terri Schiavo dies, the autopsy takes place, whatever follows, she is buried, and then what? Well, it goes on and, believe me, there are people that politicize this. There are people who have an agenda that will be advanced by her death, in this manner. They are people who are basically secularists, as we've discussed, who do not believe that there is a divine connection between all of us and our creator, that we don't have a creator, other than the mother and dad that donated the sperm and egg, and that's it.
That's as high up the food chain as we go, gang. But as long as we have our faculties and as long as we can communicate and so forth, then we have personhood and we are entitled to life. But the bioethicists are beginning to say that if you're not conscious and not aware, you're just a little disabled, you're not dying, you're fine other than that, but you don't have personhood. What's next after that? Well, then we start deciding who's qualified to live and who isn't. This has always been my fear about this is where this takes us, the culture of death, the fact that it's becoming less and less valued by seemingly more and more people. So this "11-day rant," as I've been saying over and over again, is not just about Terry Schiavo or this case. As I have proven folks for the 16-1/2 years that I have been behind the Golden EIB Microphone, this program is about broad horizons. This program is about informing and educating and causing thought, inspiring thought, rather than just living on raw emotion, because, as I've often said to you, particularly with liberalism, the liberal "solution" to a problem never ends anything. It just creates a whole bunch more headaches.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I went ahead and printed out this piece by Wesley Smith at National Review Online. He is a senior fellow, which means he's a scholar like me, at an Institute. That's why I sit in the prestigious Attila the Hun Chair. Institutes have chairs where the scholars sit and think, and that's what Wesley Smith is. He's a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. He's an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide and a specialty consultant to the Center for Bioethics and culture, and he had I guess a debate with a Florida bioethicist named Bill Allen at Court TV Online. And as he writes today, I'm going to cut down to the nitty-gritty: "Bill, do you think Terri is a person?" Bill Allen: "No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don't think complete absence of awareness does." Mr. Smith then writes, "If you want to know how it became acceptable to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with profound cognitive disabilities, this exchange brings you to the nub of the Schiavo case — the 'first principle,' if you will. Bluntly stated, most bioethicists do not believe that membership in the human species accords any of us intrinsic moral worth. Rather, what matters is whether 'a being' or 'an organism,' or even a machine, is a 'person,' a status achieved by having sufficient cognitive capacities. Those who don’t measure up are denigrated as 'non-persons.'"
Another question: Bill, "If Terri is not a person, should her organs be procured with consent?" Bill Allen, bioethicist: "'…Yes, I think there should be consent to harvest her organs, just as we allow people to say what they want done with their assets.' Put that in your hat and ponder it for a moment: If organ harvesting from the cognitively devastated were legal today, Michael Schiavo would be the one, no doubt sanctioned by Judge Greer, who could consent to doctors’ 'stopping' Terri’s heart and harvesting her organs. Think that’s a horrid thought? Well, ponder this: More than ten years ago, transplant-medicine ethicists Robert M. Arnold and Stuart J. Youngner painted a disturbing picture of the kind of society that the bioethics movement is leading us toward: literally a culture in which organ procurement is a routine part of end-of-life care and 'planned deaths.' The ethicists predicted that in the not-too-distant future: Machine dependent patients could give consent for organ removal before they are dead. For example, a ventilator-dependent ALS patient could request that life support be removed at 5:00 P.M, but that at 9:00 A.M. the same day he be taken to the operating room, put under general anesthesia, and his kidneys, liver and pancreas removed…The patient’s heart would not be removed and would continue to beat throughout surgery, perfusing the other organs with warm, oxygen-and-nutrient-rich blood until they were removed. The heart would stop, and the patient would be pronounced dead only after the ventilator was removed at 5:00 P.M., according to plan, and long before the patient could die from renal, hepatic, or pancreatic failure."
And then Mr. Smith concludes this: "There is a direct line from the Terri Schiavo dehydration to the potential for this stunning human strip-mining scenario’s becoming a reality. Indeed, as Arnold and Youngner put it so well, 'If a look into such a future hurts our eyes (or turns our stomachs), is our discomfort any different from what we would have experienced 30 years ago by looking into the future that is today?'" So this is just an example here. There are people out there saying, "She's not a person. She doesn't have personhood. Just because she's a human doesn't mean she's a person. Gotta have other things. If you don't have those things, then we can make a deal with you or your guardian, harvest your organs, set up a time whereby you will die where your organs are still worth something to us, and then do the surgery to remove the organs. Then we stop your heart, and at that point when you're dead, you have finally achieved personhood because you will have provided value by donating your worthless, non-personhood organs to others."
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Bump
Bump for Rush!!!
Who's Rush Limbaugh?
:)
Mary Jo Kopechne gave her life for this country in 1969
Scumbucket secular humanist leftists. I can't say what I really feel here. Pray for mercy, and pray for forgiveness.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.
< /sarcasm >
I agree with you. I'm stunned, too. I feel as if I'm looking at a lot of people differently today, including a lot of Freepers.
(/sarcasm)
welcome to the brave new world.
(/shudder)
Ive started to think the pro death crowd didn't want a debate. I think they hoped Terri would die quickly and then they would push the agenda a little harder.
Unfortunately for them Terri has lasted much longer than they expected and people have had 12 days to think about this in depth. People who once said "just let her go" have become horrified at what is happening. I know, I'm one of them.
The pro death attorney is forced into making some really psycho comments about how good Terri looks and people aren't buying it. H & C just had a couple of guests on the show who further expose what this is about. One was whining about Bush stealing the election and the other was wearing an American communist youth T-shirt.
I would make another Nazi analogy, which I find perfectly appropriate - after all, didn't they pioneer the idea of "life unworthy of living"? - but I've been chastened from making such inflammatory remarks. So let me be the first to say folks, there's no similarity in starving a disabled person in America today and starving a disabled person in Germany during the Third Reich. None whatsoever. Now go home and get some sleep.
Strawman gets used a lot on talk radio. But, there is a question here. Who is the we that will do these things?
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
30 years ago, we thought Soylent Green was just a sci-fi flick with an interesting, albeit sick, twist at the end.
If we are unable to stop the execution of Terri Schiavo (and interrupt the despicable plans of the death culture, in the process) we could be one step closer to a Soylent Green society.
It's not that far-fetched. 30 years ago, we would never have envisioned a judge pushing the murder of a disabled woman whose husband wanted to dispose of her for his convenience. Are we getting ready to add more grease to the slippery slope, or are we getting ready to spray the slope down with Dawn and cut the amount of grease on that slippery slope?
So after they go for the comatose prison inmates, who do you think is going to be next judged unfit to live? I would make a joke about conservatism being judged a mental illness - the academic groundwork for that is already laid - but that might strike too close to home for some folks.
This is horrible! Imagine saying, "Today, I will die at 5:00 p.m." At 9:00 a.m., they wheel you into an operating room and proceed to gut you like a fish, except for your heart, which remains beating just long enough to keep the organs fresh with oxyginated blood through 5:00 p.m.
I stopped giving blood a few years back because everyone makes money along the assembly line to the recipient except me. Now, they expect to you to donate your organs and, from that moment on, you are a walking cashbox for someone else and an afterthought once the withdrawals have been made.
No more organ or blood "donations!" There's got to be something they can offer me or my family in exchange for healthy blood, tissue, and organs!
Excellent comments from Rush!
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