poor article.
Many liberals supported Schiavo's right to life because they remember the Nazi T4 program...it's a civil rights issue...especially for Jews who remember history.
And maybe Jesse Jackson remembers history too, like the Tuskeegee experiment.
I like the mention of the post 9-11 mentality here.
Speaking of that I wonder how long before the conspirazoids start believing that this whole thing was a clandestine orchestration by the right (Rove et al) to rally the base.
Soon to be Michael Moore movie: The Terri Affair and the End of Privacy.
Why was only one man, Judge Greer, the determinant of the facts in Terri's case?
In most other cases, it is a jury that determines the facts. Certainly the facts in all capital cases are determined by a jury.
Qualified individuals can make wise judgments. An individual can also make horrific judgments. Our society has determined that groups of individuals are more likely to be wise. That is why we have city councils, company boards of directors, and jury trials. Groups of people tend to be "less imperfect" than single individuals.
Setting aside personalities, as distasteful as they appear to be, having only one person determine the facts seems to be the central failing of the judicial system in Terri's case. For the future, that failing could be solved by legislative action.
Liberals view people as resource users and destroyers of the earth. Too many people, too few resources. Killing off the unwanted thru abortions and what they view as useless thru euthanasia saves valuable resources. That is the humanist socialist mindset.
The SOURCE of liberal support for Terri's death is simply this reason: Liberals have aligned themselves in a marriage-of-convenience with the concept of "Legal Positivism".
Said simply, legal positivism is a perspective that accepts the law 'as law' because it's the law, rather than because the law is 'right' because it flows from natural law.
A legal positivist will never say, as a Dickens' character said, that "sometimes the law is an a*s". A legal positivist begins any legal analysis with a predefined belief that the law IS morality, and reasons from the pre-ordained morality of the law -- WHATEVER that morality is.
One can see, immediately, that this hardly seems like a "liberal" position in any classical sense.
But the liberals have taken that position because the Supreme Court has granted rights that the left will not relinquish, including most importantly abortion on demand, and increasingly, homosexual rights.
To embrace legal positivism is to, in effect, close the door on further debate as to whether, on natural law principles, abortion should be regulated or banned. The liberal legal positivist understands that the Supreme Court has become a one-way ratchet to enshrine leftist principles in American life that, under a majoritarian process, would never see the light of day.
Terri died to uphold that principle.
This is a beautiful article, and I say that as an unabashed Theocrat myself!
Liberalism has always been irrational. "Pacifists" for class war? Gun-grabbers for "armed struggle?" "Anti-nationalists" who support the most retrograde, mystical nationalisms (only the US and Israel don't meet their criteria)? Lesbians in burkhas to demonstrate their solidarity with moslem fundamentalists?
These people are mentally ill. They'd better hope they lose this ideological conflict, or their comrades would have them euthenased!
Oops, didn't mean to open a can of worms here guys. Sorry.