Please my post # 1365.
. I take no offense, myself, and accept the observation for what it is. Sadly for Don Imus, he offered a similar explanation to Al Sharpton, and it fell on deaf ears, as part of the liberal psyche, I think, is to be offended.
What I do note is the tendency for you to see us as a block, as different, in that we are monolithic in our thinking and you are enlightened and flexible. Perhaps I can amplify a bit.
Most of us fighters for Terri's Legacy are religious, and hold our faith close. Not all of us are such, though, and we found grand support in Pinellas Park from atheiests as well as those of diverse faiths (with the possible exception of Scientologists, who were jeering Terri...) I speak personally as a plain Catholic Christian, and although my faith may differ to one degree or another from that of others here, we do cleave to similar core values. One of these is a belief there are absolutes. We believe there is real good and real evil. Terri by most all estimates was good. Mikey by all evidence is flatly evil. We believe there is clearcut wrong and obvious right.
At one time in my youth I was tempted to assume from my college profs that morality could be relative, that a compromise could bridge gaps. As I matured I noticed those perspectives were part and parcel of the more liberal, nay, the Marxists, as well as the non-religious and the anti-religious.
If you think these defining values are an unacceptable rigid thinking, I posit that it is you who are mistaken and you could benefit from a little flexibility in understanding basic values of good and bad. As an example I just mentioned, we who are by your standards too rigid to do any good with the Texas Futile Care Law are precisely the ones who brought it out into the sunshine in the first place! The moral relativitists at DU ignored the issue when they could have done something. It is we and people like us who, on similar blogs and in the media who turned this into an issue and painted the law with the lumination it deserved.
I list the great compromisers of the world...
Erton1, I reckon you were mistaken in insisting that all the legal experts agreed with Greer and that no reasonable person could possibly disagree. Here's some very stiff disagreement for you.
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Hentoff:
I covered the Terri Schiavo case for more than four years, going against nearly all of the other media in emphasizing and documenting that this was not a "right to die" case, but a disability-rights case. And that's why many leading disability-rights organizations filed legal briefs — unreported by most of the press — on her behalf.
Terri Schiavo was indeed brain-damaged, but her husband had stopped all testing and rehabilitation for her in 1993 (Terri died in March 2005). For years, Michael Schiavo — while "devoted" to his wife's wishes — was living with another woman, with whom he had two children. (He has since married her.)
As for what Terri Schiavo's wishes were — if the time came when she could not speak for herself — in the winter 2005 issue of the University of Minnesota Law School's "Constitutional Commentary," Notre Dame Law School professor O. Carter Snead reports that, at a January 2000 trial, five witnesses testified on whether she would have declined artificial nutrition and hydration (water) in the state she was in.
Terri's mother and a close friend of Terri said (as another friend has also confirmed) that Terri would have wanted these basic life needs. However, three witnesses assured the court that Terri would have approved the death her husband provided for her. These death messengers were Michael Schiavo, his brother and his sister-in-law (a family that sticks together).
It was on their testimony that Florida state judge George Greer ruled there was "clear and convincing evidence" of Terri's wishes, thereby justifying the removal of the feeding tube.
Dismayingly, 19 additional judges in six courts, including federal courts, based their terminal judgments on Terri Schiavo entirely on Greer's ruling. The courts erred fatally in not conducting an investigation of Greer's entire handling of the case from the beginning. For another example, he ignored a number of charges of neglect by her guardian, Michael Schiavo. When Terri Schiavo died, I wrote that hers was the longest public execution in American history. Even the most monstrous murderer on death row would have received far more due process of law than she did.
"As to legal concerns," William Anderson — a senior psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard University — wrote when she died: "a guardian may refuse any medical treatment, but drinking water is not such a procedure. It is not within the power of a guardian to withhold, and not in the power of a rational court to prohibit."
In "Constitutional Commentary," professor Michael Paulsen of the University of Minnesota Law School warned: "This is the story of a judicially ordered killing of an innocent, disabled woman. It is the story of the failure of all branches of government ... adequately to protect that particular life. It is an end-of-life story that is likely to be repeated, without high legal drama, in the lives of many of us."
Or, as Pat Anderson, former lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents, told me: "Euthanasia in America now has a name — and a face."