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.
Good post.
Very good. Except I am not so sure about majoritarian process. The judges are produced by politicians who are elected by majoritarian processes, and the blind judge was elected and reelected directly.
It is indeed the conflict between man-made law and Divine Law, but a majoritarian process produces man-made law also. The Left embraces man-made law because it is fundamentally a statist idea.