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.
The will to live is VERY STRONG. Our opponents foolishly and unwisely IGNORE that reality.
I agree
Me too, I just cannot see conservatism in wanting the state to kill non-dying citizens.
And, usually conservatives look at precedents being set.
I would never have thought we would be arguing that a man with two wives still had the right of life and death decisions over the first one.
I would never have thought there would be such anger over the stance of many to allow parents to take on a daughter scheduled for death and care for her rather than kill her.
All the while claiming that they did not want the tubes pulled.
Something else for those so eager to judge the value of others' lives.
Have you ever visited a nursing home and talked to those little people? Sure many are pitiful - but just look at the gentleness, the sweet eyes, and those little gnarled hands. They are precious people who have lived their years of contribution to this world and are winding down.
They have lost a lot - they have lost the meaness, the competitiveness, the drives that made them do good or evil. They are again like children with gentle spirits.
The innocence you see in the eyes of children, you will see in the eyes of the elderly, the deformed, the PVS, the severely handicapped. Each has faced hardships and come through it better people.
God does not consider these lives of no value. These lives paint a picture and what you see when looking at that picture is the beauty of humbleness, innocence, hardships endured, life lived.
And God expects them to be treated with loving kindness and care not death-dealing manipulating staff and relatives calculating how to kill them.
Just because they are foolish and unwise (stupid/ignorant) does not mean we allow them to destroy the constitutional rights of all.
Or turn the United States into Germany circa WWII. NOT here, NOT ever.
I would never have thought we would be arguing that a man with two wives still had the right of life and death decisions over the first one.
I would never have thought there would be such anger over the stance of many to allow parents to take on a daughter scheduled for death and care for her rather than kill her.
___Nor I. It has made me re-evaluate some of the people I used to think were "conservatives."
Id the Schindlers were willing to care for Terri, why not allow them
to do so, in the absense of her confirmable clear intent to be allowed to die?
Why not err on the side of life rather than death?
"but after ten years in a persistent vegetative state that has robbed her of most of her cerebrum and all but the most instinctive of neurological functions"
Based on the autopsy. So for all in this state, we should perform an autopsy and then determine if they should live?
The problem here has nothing to do with medical facts but everything to do with the husband. Decisions to "remove tubes" occur daily in this country with no living wills but with the support of the whole family.
I want to see Mark Furman's take on the case.
Thanks for the feedback.
From the response to my observation that
I thought some people might have missed my point.
Wise words.
The ability to reject inconvenient facts explains a lot about the OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson juries.
A true conservative looks at the facts and makes a determination. A true conservative ignores the gossip and innuendo, the petty name-calling and character assassinations, the conspiracy theories and emotion-based statements.
A true conservative honors the rule of law. A true conservative does not go looking for judicial activists to overturn existing law, but instead works within the system to generate the support of the people.
The posters on this forum who spoke out against Terri's wishes acted like liberals, not conservatives. The factless, incorrect, misleading, and emotion-laden rhetoric on the Terri threads looked more like DU than FR.
An embarrassing and dark moment for this forum, no doubt.
Why belabor the point?
THAT'S your evidence that Terri changed her mind? Are you ill?
This jumped out at me - Democrats have a long record of inventing civil rights and repressing those they claim to be helping. This whole article is prefaced with a partisan lie.
Yep. Can you answer it?
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