Posted on 12/07/2005 5:02:27 PM PST by eartotheground
Terri Schiavo's husband starts a PAC devoted to defeating the Bible-thumping politicians who used his comatose wife as a football.
By Michael Scherer
Dec. 7, 2005 | At the height of the battle, Michael Schiavo appeared to be a reluctant cultural warrior. His wife, Terri, lay comatose, in her 15th year of vegetative slumber, connected to a feeding tube, but well beyond resuscitation. Around her hospice, a political hurricane swirled.
In Terri's name, President George Bush interrupted his vacation, Sen. Bill Frist played doctor from the Senate floor, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush launched a flimsy criminal investigation, and Rep. Tom DeLay issued ominous political threats to the judiciary. The religious right had turned Terri into a symbolic beachhead in the battle for a "culture of life," and the Republican Party had answered the call.
But Michael Schiavo, who legally controlled his wife's fate, never showed any predilection for the limelight. In fact, he wished that everyone would just leave his family alone. "People are removed from their feeding tubes every day across this country," Schiavo told CNN's Larry King, in a rare interview last March. "The government chose this one to pander for their religious right, pander for their votes."
But now, as the one-year anniversary of Terri Schiavo's death approaches, Michael Schiavo is changing his approach and preparing to enter the political fray. Terri's fate has already been decided. Now her husband wants to claim her legacy. "For 15 years, I have been watching the politicians working their ways into my case. I felt I needed to do something when this was all said and done," Schiavo told Salon on Tuesday. "I didn't ask for this fight, but now I am ready."
This week Schiavo will roll out a new political action committee, called Terri PAC, with the hope of raising money to defeat the politicians who tried to intervene in the legal battle between Schiavo and Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler. "Whatever I can do, I am going to do," says Schiavo, who works as a nurse in the Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater, Fla. Starting in January, he plans to change his work hours to three 12-hour shifts a week, allowing him more time to work on politics.
At the same time, Schiavo is putting the finishing touches on a book, "Terri: The Truth," which is scheduled for release in March. His former in-laws, the Schindlers, have also announced plans to publish a book with their side of the story in March. The Schindlers have been working to establish their own legacy for their daughter. This summer, the couple gave their support to a new seminarian scholarship in Terri's name at the Ave Maria University. "We feel that Terri was chosen by God to combat evil," Bob Schindler told a Catholic news service. "What a fine way to pay tribute to her life."
Terri PAC will not be the first time Schiavo has inserted himself into politics since his wife's death. During this year's Virginia governor's race, Schiavo volunteered his support for the victorious Democrat, Tim Kaine, after his Republican opponent, Jerry Kilgore, said he did "not agree to the forced starvation of any individual." Though Kaine did not trumpet the endorsement, the amount of press coverage it received was encouraging, says Derek Newton, a political consultant at the November Group, in Coral Gables, Fla., who is working with Schiavo. "From the PAC's perspective, Kaine's win was very important," Newton said.
One Florida Democrat, Rep. Robert Wexler, who represents parts of Palm Beach, says that Michael Schiavo could have an impact going into the 2006 midterm election. "Terri Schiavo and Michael Schiavo were some of the most prominent victims of the Republicans' abuse of power," said Wexler. "Michael Schiavo's effort is not only appropriate and timely, but it is also extremely important."
In addition to funneling money to certain political campaigns, the PAC will name those politicians who supported government intervention in his wife's case, as well as those who opposed intervention. Schiavo also hopes to use the Web site to educate people about the importance of living wills. Newton said that Schiavo has no plans to run for political office himself; the two have not yet discussed whether Schiavo will collect a salary from the PAC for his efforts.
In the interview, Schiavo mentioned Rep. DeLay, R-Texas, Sen. Frist, R-Tenn., and Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., as primary targets of the effort. He also said he wanted to be involved in the upcoming Florida governor's race. "We are going to focus on holding these people accountable," Schiavo said.
That honor actually belongs to the Schindlers.
I think Michael was responsible for putting her into that state and getting rid of the evidence was behind his actions. However, my thoughts are nothing but conjecture.
As a separate issue, though, the autopsy showed there was no one at home and had Terri supporters got their way, this empty house would still be on life support. The supporters were wrong.
Get it right. I said I was embarrassed by the Terri threads because the Terri-bots wouldn't know a fact if it bit them in the a$$.
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
A person whose "brain [is] gone cannot breathe for herself and cannot have a naturally beating heart.
I would have been willing to accept the autopsy results if the coroner in question possessed some semblance of impartiality, but the one who performed the autopsy happened to be a friend and ally of Michael Schiavo. Whatever one thinks of Schiavo and his motives, a coroner who is personally involved with one side of the debate cannot be called neutral.
Everyone should get on his mailing list and send back an empty business reply envelope......
Same thing I do to most democrats. They do it to us.
You're right. Michael Schiavo was not a bigamist, he was an adulterer. Since I *do* care about facts, I acknowledged the fact that Michael Schiavo remained legally married to Terri and continued to assert his decision-making rights as her husband while openly cohabitating with another woman and their two children.
BTW, Robert Wexler is my Representative; I'm gonna have to go after him next year as well
Any other FLorida FReepers wanna help pull him out??
Who made michael schiavo God? He could have walked away and not put the Schidlers through so much pain, but it seems he is the vengeful kind, and wanted to stick the knife through the Schindlers heart and twist it.
Who's a bigamist? Michael? Really? Care to support that with some kind of fact? (Fact? Facts? A Terri-bot spouting facts? Never!)
Uh michael schiavo having children to another woman while still being legally married to Terri Schindler Schiavo is a bigamist.
Its always about the money isn't it Michael ?
May you suffer a fate 10x worse than what you inflicted on Terri.
Should Read: He would have had to have tried to legally marry her and pass it off to be a bigamist.
Amen to that! The Schindlers and anyone else that thought they could ride her for publicity and use her up did. Michael has every right to be pissed off about how all the holy rollers judged him and defamed him.
Her parents physically abused her?
"Used her as football" as in physically abused her.
Your brain would be in pretty bad shape after two weeks without water. It is impossible to tell from autopsy what the real functional state of Terri's brain was while she was still receiving food and water.
There is much about the brain that is poorly understood. Although static radiographic examination (or post-mortem examination) of a person's brain can often suggest things about a person's clinical condition, it can't really prove much. There are people walking around today (literally) who would likely be diagnosed as "brain dead" by someone examining a CT scan. I saw on TV a person whose head was blown open by a .357 and whose brain was largely splattered. The damage was so severe that there was no way the person should have been able to walk or talk or do any such thing. And yet, on television, the person was definitely functional.
Some of Terri's supporters had suggested that they believed her to be concious, but severely motor-impaired. The autopsy revealed that the most-severely damaged parts of Terri's brain were in the motor-control area; the parts responsible for awareness were less-severely damaged.
One question some freepers have raised, BTW: why would the parts of Terri's brain supplied by the carotid artery show the most severe damage, while Terri's other organs showed no signs of having suffered hypoxia? Could that part of the brain have been deprived of blood flow even while Terri's heart was beating?
I don't think the guy was a bigamist was he?, he wasn't married to his mistress at the time, he just made a kid out-of-wedlock with her while being married to Teri. Really slimy and sleazy.
I might have a possible answer. Teri was used as a football when she was drop kicked down those stairs on that fateful night, February 25, 1990.
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