John Leo sums upthe actions of the Shaivo debate participants.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/050411/11john.htmIt is quoted below with some commentary by me. All emphasis is my doing.
4/11/05
By John Leo
End of the Affair
Some final notes on the Terri Schiavo case. The behavior of conservatives: Uneven and sometimes awful, with lots of vituperation and extreme charges. (Jeb Bush does not remind me of Pontius Pilate; I don't think it's fair to circulate rumors that Michael Schiavo was a wife-beater.) Worse were the revolutionary suggestions that the courts be ignored or defied, perhaps by sending in the National Guard to reconnect the tube. This is "by any means necessary" rhetoric of the radical left, this time let loose by angry conservatives. Where does this rhetoric lead?
I think we saw some of this in the APS debate on this issue, with charges of "nazi death cultist" and "Pontius Pilate."
The behavior of liberals: Mystifying. While conservative opinion was severely splintered, liberal opinion seemed monolithic: Let her die. Liberals usually rally to the side of vulnerable people, but not in this case. Democrats talked abstractly about procedures and rules, a reversal of familiar roles. I do not understand why liberal friends defined the issue almost solely in terms of government intruding into family matters. Liberals are famously willing to enter family affairs to defend individual rights, opposing parental-consent laws, for example. Why not here? Nonintervention is morally suspect when there is strong reason to wonder whether the decision-maker in the family has the helpless person's best interests at heart.
Here I disagree with Leo. I did not find liberal opinion mystifying. It is entirely in accord with the view that a baby/fetus in the womb is a mere lump of cells to be suctioned out if at all inconvenient. It is also in accord with the view that we ought to create embyos, etc. in order to destroy them for our pleasure or grow them to a certain point and "harvest" them.
I think that silence or calls for "following procedure" was the wisest course of action for those in favor of the above. Outright cheerleading, with chants like:
"Pull the tube!"
let us shout
she's not human
just a brussell sprout!
HOORAAY!!!might not go over well with most of America.
A few liberals broke ranks--10 members of the black caucus, for instance, plus Sen. Tom Harkin and Ralph Nader, who called the case "court-imposed homicide." But such voices were rare. My suspicion is that liberal opinion was guided by smoldering resentment toward President Bush and the rising contempt for religion in general and conservative Christians in particular. We seem headed for much more conflict between religious and secular Americans.
I saw plenty of contempt for religion in general & Christians in particular in the APS debate.
The behavior of the news media: Terrible. "Pro-life" columnist Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice called it "the worst case of liberal media bias I've seen yet." Many stories and headlines were politically loaded. Small example of large disdain: On air, a CBS correspondent called the Florida rallies a "religious roadshow," a term unlikely to have been applied to Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights demonstrations or any other rallies meeting CBS's approval. More important, it was hard to find news that Michael Schiavo had provided no therapy or rehabilitation for his wife since 1994 and even blocked the use of antibiotics when Terri developed a urinary infection. And the big national newspapers claimed as a fact that Michael Schiavo's long-delayed recollection of Terri's wish to die, supported only by hearsay from Michael's brother and a sister-in-law, met the standard for "clear and convincing evidence" of consent. It did nothing of the sort, particularly with two of Terri's friends testifying the opposite. The media covered the intervention by Congress as narrowly political and unwarranted. They largely fudged the debates over whether Terri Schiavo was indeed in a persistent vegetative state and whether tube-feeding meant that Schiavo was on life support. In the Nancy Cruzan case, the Supreme Court said that tube-feeding is life support, but some ethicists and disability leaders strongly dispute that position.
When liberals or members of designated minority groups (DMG) use their churches to organize or their faith as justification for their views, their views are "informed by their faith. Non-DMG conservatives who do the same are "Christo-fascists."
The MSM desperately sought to spin it as a "right to die" issue, when it was nothing of the sort. No serious commentator on the "pro-tube" side of the debate argued that an individual can not refuse life-saving treatment. The issue was the validity of Terri's desire to have the tube pulled, given her circumstances, and Michael Shaivo's fitness as her guardian to make such a decision.
Unsettled questions. Public opinion: Polls showed very strong opposition to the Republican intervention, but the likelihood is that those polled weren't primarily concerned with Terri Schiavo or Republican overreaching, if that's what it was. They were thinking about themselves and how to avoid being in Terri Schiavo's predicament. Many, too, have pulled the plug on family members and don't want these wrenching decisions second-guessed by the courts or the public.
I surely want the state to be as far away from such a decision as possible, other than to err on the side of life if someone ends up in such a state without any family to speak/act for them.
If this is correct, it means the country has yet to make up its mind on the issue of personhood and whether it is moral and just to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with grave cognitive disabilities. The following candid exchange occurred on Court TV last month in a conversation between author Wesley Smith and bioethicist Bill Allen. Smith: ["Bill, do you think Terri is a person?" Allen: "No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood." Fetuses, babies, and Alzheimer's patients are only minimally aware and might not fit this definition of personhood, and so would have no claim on our protections. Smith points out that other bioethicists narrow protection further, requiring rationality, the capacity to experience desire, or the ability to value one's own existence. Tighter definitions of personhood expand the number of humans who can be killed without blame or harvested for their organs while still alive. On Court TV, Allen argued that the family could have removed Terri's organs while she was alive, "just as we allow people to say what they want done with their assets." This issue has been hiding behind the Terri Schiavo case for years. Soon it will be out in the open.
I think this last bit bears repeating:
Allen argued that the family could have removed Terri's organs while she was alive, "just as we allow people to say what they want done with their assets."
We have an inkling of where this issue will slide, given the happenings in the Netherlands and their practices of euthanasia of the terminally ill and newborns born with dificulties.
