[goldstategop]

Last I heard, we don't conduct referenda to determine who should live and who should die. They used to have these displays in the Roman amphitheaters where the crowds used to show which way their thumbs went in deciding whether someone should be fed to the lions. I'd like to think we're more civilized than the bloodthirsty pagans of ancient Rome.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[chimera]

I'd like to think we're more civilized than the bloodthirsty pagans of ancient Rome.

I'd like to think that, too, but sometimes I wonder. It's hard to imagine that even Rome amidst the worst of its bloodthirsty revelry and debauchery would have imagined killing a newborn by sucking it's brains out while in the process of delivery, or burning the skin off of unborn children with injected concentrated saline solutions. Yet it happens in this country all the time.

We're seeing in the Schiavo case the logical endpoint of the culture of death. Killing innocents persons has become acceptable and sanctioned by society, with certain caveats (which themselves are being eroded away). Things like the court accepting the hearsay of another individual with obvious conflicts of interest, taking polls to gauge public approval of the killing, etc., all lend an aura of acceptability. Of course, the preference is that the killing be shielded by the masquerade of "privacy", done out of sight and out of mind, hidden away somewhere in a chamber of horrors abortion mill, or a hospice room to which visitation of family and friends is denied.