Posted on 06/19/2005 8:19:40 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Just when it seemed that every liberal commentator on the Terri Schiavo case was starting to sound like Barney Frank, the great Joan Didion published a long and remarkable article on the case in the quite far left New York Review of Books of June 9. Frank, of course, took the occasion of last week's Schiavo autopsy results as yet another opportunity to denounce Republicans as "this fanatical party willing to impose its own views on people."
For those of you still somehow unaware, "imposing their views" is a semiofficial Democratic meme or code phrase meaning "religious people who vote their moral views and disagree with us." Didion, on the other hand, cut through all the rhetoric about imposing views and said the struggle to spare Schiavo's life was "essentially a civil rights intervention." This is a phrase of great clarity, particularly since Democrats have a long track record of protecting civil rights and Republicans don't. Behind the grotesque media circus, the two parties were essentially switching roles. In the first round of public opinion--the polls--the GOP took a beating. But in the long run, the American people tend to rally behind civil rights, and the party that fights to uphold them is likely to prevail.
On the "rational" or "secular" side of the dispute, Didion wrote, there was "very little acknowledgment that there could be large numbers of people, not all of whom could be categorized as 'fundamentalists' or 'evangelicals,' who were genuinely troubled by the ramifications of viewing a life as inadequate and so deciding to end it." Amen. There was also little admission that this was a "merciful euthanasia" controversy posing as a "right to die" case. Many of us understood, as the autopsy has now shown, that Schiavo was severely damaged, but a national psychodrama built around the alleged need to end a life without clear consent is likely to induce anxieties in all but the most dedicated right-to-die adherents.
"The ethical argument" Didion did not conclude that ending Schiavo's life was a wrongful act, but she seemed to be leaning that way. She wrote: "What might have seemed a central argument in this case--the ethical argument, the argument about whether, when it comes to life and death, any of us can justifiably claim the ability or the right to judge the value of any other being's life--remained largely unexpressed, mentioned, when at all, only to be dismissed."
That issue was slurred and muffled by the media and by shrewd, though completely misleading, right-to-die arguments that distracted us from the core issue of consent. George Felos, the attorney of Terri Schiavo's husband, Michael, told Larry King, "Quality of life is one of those tricky things because it's a very personal and individual decision. I don't think any of us have the right to make a judgment about quality of life for another."
Here Felos piously got away with adopting a deadly argument against his own position by presenting it as somehow bolstering his case. This can happen only when the media are totally incurious or already committed to your side. Michael Schiavo made a somewhat similar eye-popping argument to King: "I think that every person in this country should be scared. The government is going to trample all over your private and personal matters. It's outrageous that these people that we elect are not letting you have your civil liberties to choose what you want when you die." Americans were indeed scared that they might one day be in Terri Schiavo's predicament.
But Michael was speaking as though Terri Schiavo's wishes in the matter were clear and Republicans were determined to trample them anyway. Yet her wishes, as Didion says, were "essentially unconfirmable" and based on bits of hearsay reported by people whose interests were not obviously her own--Michael Schiavo and two of his relatives.
One hearsay comment--"no tubes for me" --came while Terri Schiavo was watching television. "Imagine it," Didion wrote. "You are in your early 20s. You are watching a movie, say on Lifetime, in which someone has a feeding tube. You pick up the empty chip bowl. 'No tubes for me,' you say as you get up to fill it. What are the chances you have given this even a passing thought?" According to studies cited last year in the Hastings Center Report, Didion reminds us, almost a third of written directives, after periods as short as two years, no longer reflect the wishes of those who made them. And here nothing was written down at all.
The autopsy confirms the extraordinary damage to Schiavo and discredits those who tried to depict the husband as a wife-beater. But the autopsy has nothing to say about the core moral issue: Do people with profound disabilities no longer have a right to live? That issue is still on the table.
Sorry...
I like your tagline. :-)
Yeah...we wouldn't have even heard about the Schiavo case if there hadn't been some stupid little family squabble. You know, some petty squabble about those selfish parents not wanting their daughter murdered by dehydration/starvation. If only the TV cameras hadn't shown up the murderers could have killed her in peace and all of us "extreme right to life fanatics" would have found something else to do while she was dehydrated/starved to death. Abortion is just hunky-dory too because all over the country someone kills a living child around 3,500 times a day. Everyone's doing it - why should we care?
So you believe the State Legislature may pass any law it wants whether it passes Constitutional muster or not.
You say Terri's Law was Constitutional...The Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts said it was not.
I should believe you?
Right.
that gets me quakin in my boots I must say.
bingo. The fascism of the 30's and 40's just went underground and comes up in more 'subtle' ways.
The US supreme court once ruled that blacks/slaves were 3/5 human too, didn't they?
They also ruled that babies aren't human and so can be slaughtered in the womb. Both the Legislatures and Courts are corrupt and made up of too many people with no absolute moral code. The Constitution is meant to reflect some moral code even higher than itself. But we're bound and determined to rid ourselves of that higher code, (e.g. Judge Moore in Alabama tried to stop it) because the Constitution can then even more easily be made into a malleable document. OR shall we say "living" document.
That is just a matter of opinion. The Florida Supreme Court seemed to disagree.
er just TO be safe.
And since opinions change like the wind, why have any laws at all?
And if Terri had put her wishes in writing? Still euthanasia?
that gets me quakin in my boots I must say.
And it's not just some list, I have to say. It is, and I quote from robertpaulsen, the "racist, $hit-for-brains, lying trolls like you who don't have a clue and add nothing to the threads but your poisonous screeds" list. (See post #222)
The legislature of Florida passed a law. The Supreme Court of Florida, exercising its legitimate powers under the Florida constitution, found that law to be in violation of said constitution. The SCOTUS, rightfully, refused to hear the case.
The system works just fine. You just don't like the decision it came to.
Yes.
And "euthanasia" is just a euphemism for murder.
No you should believe the law makers that made the law and the citizens that elected the law makers, I guess according to you they were all wrong, What do they know, better to be ruled by the men in the robes - all of them not event elected by the citizens. So why bother with a legislative branch if the judiciary can just strike down any law that it does not like. Let this happen and sit back and say all is ok and we soon will find ourselves governed by the judiciary.
And Dred Scott was not a human being but was instead just a piece of property. He and his family could have been dehydrated or starved to death if Irene Emerson wanted them to. And that would have been perfectly fine. Is that what you're saying?
You wrote: "The feeding was futile because it only sustained her body. Her "life", her consciousness, was already gone.
I understand your point, but you are mistaken. Life and consciousness are separate things. Terri Schiavo possessed life until she died--- of dehydration, as the autopsy concluded, and not of her underlying brain injury. If she had not been alive, it would not have been "necessary" to kill her.
Consciousness, on the other hand, is an intermittent experience in life. According to many brain researchers (like Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, "The Quantum Brain,") no particular stratum or organ in the neural network seems to function specifically for consciousness: it seemes to be everywhere and nowhere in the brain anatomy.
Human life exists --- indeed thrives --- for months before consciousness can be measured; and throughout our lives it waxes and wanes. There is no ethical difference between a fetus in the womb, a drunk unconscious in the gutter, an autistic 2-year-old, the reversibly comatose, the momentarily unconscious, and a Rhodes scholar asleep in his bed, inasmuch as they still possess human dignity despite their current inability to "think" as self-conscious adults.
That a brain-trauma patient or an early embryo is absolutely unconscious only means that he is unable to function as a person right now or under present conditions, not that he lacks the being of a person. And it is being a person that matters. People under anesthesia cannot feel pain, think or communicate, but this simply means they cannot function as human persons, not that they cease to be persons.
It intrigues me that you say, "If she could have been fed orally, what you're saying is true."
Hm.
In that case, Terri Schiavo possessed human rights in 1996, when Carla Sauer Iyer, RN, fed her with a baby bottle with pudding and jello, but did not possess human rights from 1990-1995 or 1997-2005 because she was not fed orally?
I'm not trying ot mock you here, I'm just trying to grasp the impliations of your statement. Just what is the relationship beween oral feeding and human rights?
Especially those rights which our American philosophy of law calls "inalienable"?
Considering how eager the Fl. Supreme Court was in making a ruling on the Brown case and setting legal precedent in doing so - it is safe to conclude that they had a very strong opinion on this subject matter - and they were not about to let the Florida Legislature wash that all away with Terri's Law.
Once again the extreme religous right is led into the political wasteland by Randal Terry and Co. And have greatly damaged the pro-life movement in the process.
The last GOP President to carry as low an approval rating as Bush does now was Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate. That stupid night flight from Crawford to Washington to sign a Bill that was Un-Constitutional and clearly an over-reach of Federal power into a State family Law matter smacked of utter hypocrisy, especially in light of the law G.W. Bush signed in Texas allowing feeding tubes removed from futile patients even if the family does not want them to be removed.
Now, others may decide that if they are brain damaged with no hope of recovery, that's it. Don't feed them artificially or orally. On and on. It's a personal choice.
Don't get me started on Iyer. If she said today was Tuesday I'd check my calendar.
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