Yahoo! News – Terri Schiavo Dies After Bitter Legal Battle
Poor Terri finally is allowed to pass away after thirteen days without a feeding tube, and only fifteen years after God tried to take her in the first place. The rule of law was upheld, all legal processes were fairly adjudicated, and a husband was allowed some sanctity to his marriage by fulfilling his wife’s wish not to live as a vegetable.
Partisan GOP demagoguery (with an assist from a cadre of cowardly Dems) was held at bay. Extra-constitutional overreach by the executive and legislative branches were thwarted. Bitter emotion was not allowed to overwhelm a family’s right to make private medical decisions.
Of course, that means the wingnuts are waiting with pitchforks and torches in hand, ready to storm the castle of “judicial activism”.
“This is not only a death with all the sadness that brings. This is a killing,” said Frank Pavone, a Roman Catholic priest who visited Schiavo shortly before she died.
“And for that we not only grieve that Terri has passed, but we grieve that our nation has allowed such an atrocity as this, and we pray that it will never happen again.”
A killing, huh? You mean like that black baby in Texas who was killed because his parents were poor, and George W. Bush signed a law allowing hospitals to pull the plug against the family’s wishes if a family was indigent? An atrocity? For letting a woman die a natural death? Geez, what words are you going to have left to describe genocide in Sudan or torture at Guantánamo? Super-mega-ultra-atrocity?
“Bobby Schindler, her brother, said ‘We want to be in the room when she dies.’ Michael Schiavo said, ‘No, you cannot.’ So his heartless cruelty continues until this very last moment,” Pavone said.
Heartless cruelty is keeping a brain-dead husk of a human alive because you can’t come to terms with your loss or your grief. Being alone with your wife as she passes is part of that whole “sanctity of marriage” thing you keep talking about.
President Bush expressed his condolences in a White House statement.
“I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others,” he said.
“The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions the presumption should be in the favor of life.”
There were no serious doubts; the woman was hopelessly brain damaged. What’s next, Shrub, forcing little anencephalic babies onto lifelong machine support because Jesus might come back soon enough to heal them? And are you, the Texecutioner, the man who laughed at Carla Faye Tucker, the man responsible for the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, seriously going to keep pushing this “culture of life” theme?
I’m looking forward to that time when all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected. Even the gay ones, the poor ones, the sick ones, the old ones, the ones who don’t speak English, the minority ones, the non-Christian ones, and the female ones. Let me know when you get around to that. And let me know when the strong start protecting the weak, instead of enslaving them in debt (the bankruptcy “reform”), placing them at the mercy of negligent doctors and hospitals (the tort “reform”), looting their retirement funds (the social security “reform”), and allowing them to suffer and die due to poverty (the lack of healthcare “reform”). Someone needs to get Shrub a new dictionary; he thinks “reform” means “method used to keep poor people poor and make rich people richer.”
“Well they got their way,” said a grizzled New York City man who gave his name as “Lifeboat” and knelt clutching a wooden rosary. “We’ve become barbarians. We’ve lost our humanity in this country.”
Yes, yes, we just had a bitter family feud resolved through the peaceful application of the legal process. How barbaric. We didn’t have unruly mobs and pandering politicians violate the legal rights and sanctity of a husband and wife. Truly barbaric.
“I don’t know if anything can stop this evil,” said Mary Ann McGuire of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who sat weeping with her 16-month-old son on her lap and said she feared Schiavo’s death would open the way for widespread euthanasia. “This can only get worse.”
Yes, yes, how terribly evil that a person could decide when and how they want to die. I’m so sick of hearing this pathetic slippery-slope argument that euthanasia will somehow become widespread and society will pressure the old and sick to just off themselves in some sort of Logan’s Run future dystopia. Why does anyone think they have the right to stop someone who wants to die? That’s just so incredibly foreign a concept to me. Do you want to be hooked up to ventilators, dialysis, and/or feeding tubes with no hope of recovery so your friends and family can treat you like some sort of stuffed animal comfort toy? Fine, you can have that, but you can’t force it on those of us who don’t want it!
“Many across our state and around the world are deeply grieved by the way Terri died,” Jeb Bush said.
And here, for a brief moment, I have to agree with a Bush. I’m grieved by how she died, too. In a human society she’d have been given a lethal, painless overdose of morphine years ago and passed quickly, rather than be some slowly dehydrating political freakshow for thirteen days.
