Posted on 03/29/2005 8:07:57 PM PST by Palladin
A professor at a Bible college near Scranton, Pa., was arrested Tuesday as he tried to storm into the hospice caring for Terri Schiavo.
Dow Pursley, 56, was zapped with a Taser stun gun and tackled to the ground by officers before he reached the door, Pinellas Park police said. He became the 47th protester arrested.
Pursley, who is on the faculty of the Baptist Bible College & Seminary in Clarks Summit, Pa., had two bottles of water with him, police said. He was charged with attempted burglary and resisting arrest.
Baptist Bible College officials said in a written statement that Pursley was not acting on the school's behalf and had traveled to Florida on his personal time.
"He is a dedicated man with strong beliefs and God-given convictions," the statement said.
Pursley is the clinical director of counseling programs for the theological college's graduate school. He also helps oversee a campus clinic that offers psychological counseling based on biblical teaching.
Baptist Bible College spokesman Mark Robbins said that while the college "believes in the sanctity of life," it has not taken an official position on the Schiavo case.
Doctors said that Schiavo, 41, would probably die within a week or two after the tube was removed on March 18. She suffered catastrophic brain damage in 1990 when her heart stopped for several minutes because of a chemical imbalance.
Wrong-o, Dom.
First, you presume that we should worship the Republican Party no matter what. Wrong on that count.
Second, you presume that the Republican Party actually will advance Right Action over the coming years. Based on what?
Finally, you drag a clearly hysterical red herring around the scene with your "shootout at the OK Hospice" routine.
You've lost your grip.
Dear Dominick,
To me, the best explanation is usually the simplest.
This particular case exposes significant divisions within the conservative movement. I'm unsure that the Democrats actually had to do much at all for all this to come about.
Do I hold the lamestream media for their usual piss-poor lying accounts? Certainly. But I don't think that conspiracy is required to explain their actions. They just do what lamestream media do - they lie. And they lie in herds, because most of them are not the brightest bulbs in the box. No need to conspire.
And, if I were someone in the DNC, I'd likely tell all my folks, "Keep your hands out of this!" except to offer digs here and there in the lamestream media when called on to offer up commentary. Why? Because my enemies are knifing each other while I get to watch. I may sell tickets, but I'm CERTAINLY not going to get involved in any significant way.
Because if the camera accidentally catches me offering a sharper knife to one side or the other saying, "Here, try this one," then I'll lose all the gains I'd heretofore made.
"'The Bush boys come in a far distant fourth. They are not the principal murderers. They are merely holding the coats of those doing the murdering.'"
Anyway, I don't see that even if this WERE orchestrated, it makes it any less true that the Bush boys have not exerted their legitimate executive power and authority to prevent the murder of an innocent woman.
sitetest
You can provide statistics, can't you? Or are you just swallowing the MSM blather hook, line, and sinker?
Some of Jesus' behavior would be considered bizarre by today's standards. Knocking over tables and driving people out with whips? Standing with a complete stranger and making a paste with mud and spit, putting it on his eyes and telling him where to go? He'd be hauled away for observation or practicing medicine without a license or something.
So am I. Are there snipers on rooftops down there?
Good Little Republicans ALWAYS obey the laws, you know.
They NEVER talk back to their superiors, you know.
They just put on their white shirts and ties, and their Yale-crested dinner jackets, and meet at the Club, you know.
Street fights? That's for the plebes, you know.
Dear ninenot,
"...but it indicts Jeb even more strongly than GWB."
I agree. This is properly within the scope of state action. Of course, the federal government is charged through the 14th Amendment to make sure the states respect the basic human rights of the citizens, and the federal Constitution gives the authority to the federal government to assure the republican (small "r") government of the states, thus it has become properly a federal issue, as well.
But, nonetheless, he is a distant fourth in culpability. He has acceded to a philosophy of government that isn't out of the mainstream in America, anymore - judicial supremacy. He has implicitly accepted that the judges make the law, the judges are our masters, the judges get the final say.
Although this perspective is WRONG, it is nonetheless, quite respectable and widely held. Perhaps even by a majority of our citizens. Certainly by nearly all our judges, and a majority of our politicians, both Republican and Democrat.
So, I mark Gov. Bush as essentially a good, decent, conventional politician. But nothing better.
And yes, his political career is over. But frankly, doing the right thing may have ended it, too.
Of course, one can make the argument that if you're going to likely incur professional ruin whether you do the right thing or the wrong thing, it sorta becomes cost-free to do the right thing.
sitetest
Maybe that is ok. Maybe it is not ok. I don't know. They do need money to cover operating expenses. I do not begrudge them that.
Yes, it's true. Just recall what happened to any empire throughout the ages.
All who went against God fell.
Dear Dominick,
You accuse others of hysteria, and then you write stuff like this:
"The two of you sound like you would be more comfortable at the DU."
Why? Because I'm not connected at the belly-button to the Republican Party?
Look, I pull a straight "R" ticket every election.
But that's because I believe the Republican Party is a useful vehicle to advance political goals that I believe in.
If there comes a time when the Republican Party can no longer serve as that vehicle, then, hey, I'll try to figure out something else.
Being a Catholic is marked indelibly on my soul. Being a Republican isn't.
"How do we stop and unjust law? We have it changed by our elected officials."
Well, Dominick, we actually got our elected representatives to get off their fat duffs and take a tepid swing at this. Laws actually WERE changed to permit the judicial tyrants a way to back down and stop murdering Terri.
And the tyrants ignored the law.
Of course, even Florida state law, which says you may withdraw ARTIFICIAL means of sustenance and hydration, does not say that you may refuse to offer a cup of water to a disabled person. Even Florida state law gives NO judge the authority to prevent someone from offering a cup of water to a disabled person.
Thus, the murderer greer is not currently following ANY law but of his own making. His orders are illegal on their face.
I'm no longer convinced the problem is that we haven't elected enough Republicans. I am fairly persuaded that the judges have developed a collective mindset that they're the ones who ultimately make the law. I've become persuaded that the rulings of the courts in this case are more about slapping down anyone who dares question their supremacy and less about Terri Schiavo. I believe that the actions of the Florida state legislature and the US Congress were doomed to fail, not because the judges have it out for Terri, but because the judges take these laws as an affront to the rule of judges.
This is their way of telling us that THEY, THE JUDGES, are in charge, and God help anyone who gets in their way.
That being the case, I'm not really sure how to solve that problem. Either of the Bush boys (all hat, no cattle) could have used their executive power to take Terri into protective custody.
Then, possession being nine points of the law, they could have ensured that she be sustained while they fought it out in the legislatures and the courts. They could have invited the courts' further lawlessness in issuing then-impotent judgments against the executive, and said, "If the legislature (or Congress) thinks I've done wrong to prevent the immediate murder of an innocent woman, let them impeach me for upholding her basic, fundamental human rights."
And hey, if they actually WERE impeached and convicted, and removed form office, at the very least, they would have done right.
But I kinda doubt that would have happened.
However, what we've seen is that the Bush boys just don't have the balls to challenge judicial supremacy.
Well, that's a problem. If the leaders of the Republican Party are unwilling to use their elected offices legitimately to challenge this illegitimate doctrine that the black-robed tyrants are our masters, then I'm not sure that they will be the vehicles to fix things that need fixing.
Perhaps tactically, we might stick with them to delay our slide into full totalitarianism. That could be a legitimate part of an overall strategy. Perhaps we need to do something else.
If the Republican Party's highest leaders fail us, it isn't wrong to re-evaluate what to do next.
As for what folks outside the hospice are or aren't doing hasn't been the focus of anything I've discussed, except to give praise to pro-life folks who are down there trying to do what's right. I know that at least some of the people there fit into that category.
sitetest
This judge has shifted the burden of proof from death to life.
Now in this country a disabled person will have to be able to prove they want to live instead instead of die.
You know, like guilty until proven innocent.
He did not base his decision on established law.
He simply decided it's time to start thinning the herd. To make it easy to get rid of those who can no longer work or be taxed.
This is exactly how it started in Germany in the 1930's, in the courts. It never starts with a big change. It always starts with the first one.
Don't be afraid of the people that's what they want and it is part of the brainwashing technique.
They want us to fear one another so we will give up our freedoms for security.
Actually, he did. 30 judges have reviewed this case, and say he did.
Good point.
This law was deliberately mis-interpreted.
Terri's tube is life-SUSTAINING, not -PROLONGING.
Back to Grim Greer and his cabalistic cohort of deathmonger-attorneys.
And lackadaisacal Governors.
There were probably 30 judges who thought Dred Scott was just fine, too.
Of course we are : )
I think the fury over the judiciary is nothing more than a smokescreen - the judges are just the latest scapegoats of a governmental philosophy that denys the Kingship of Christ. Pointing at the judiciary, which is unelected, lets the democratists agitate for even more democracy as it weren't democracy that got us in this predictament in the first place.
Ya lets directly elect federal judges - that'll make everything all better /sarcasm
Interesting article by Thomas Fleming yesterday in his Hard Right blog on the topic.
Hints From Aristotle: Politics IV
The most relevant paragraphs
Aristotle’s emphasis on law may sound sterile or even hollow. After all, the people, if they are really sovereign, can pass an law they like, but an Athenian would have called that kind of law a psephisma, a decree or enactment, while the word Aristotle uses is nomos, a word that can refer to a law passed by the Assembly, so long as it is consistent with justice and custom. The primary sense is that sense of rightness we have inherited from our ancestors. Nomos covers some of the territory that in English is covered by such terms as natural law and divine law as well as tradition and Common Law. Aristotle concludes that it is reasonable to say that government by popular will is not actually a constitutional commonwealth, because legitimacy depends on our observance of nomos.
If Aristotle were to look at the customs and practices of Anglo-Americans from 1700 to 1860, he might have to conclude that the American system is not a constitutional commonwealth. Both elected assemblies and magistrates (governors as well as presidents) feel free to turn over long-standing customs and legal institutions, so long as they have popular support as measured by opinion polls, while unelected judges have obliterated the Constitution’s separation of state and federal powers, declared many traditional forms of punishment constitutional, legalized infanticide, taken away guns, and nullified the Constitutional safeguards against illegal search and seizure and invasions of due process. We have mob rule without democracy and oligarchy without even the shadow of an aristocratic principle.
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