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I can think of only two occasions on which
I agreed with George Bush. Both involved the upholding of the people’s
negative, or leave-me-alone, rights.
The first was his refusal to capitulate to the Kyoto-protocol crazies.
Not surprisingly, some conservatives denounced this rare flicker of good
judgment. And I’m not talking a “Crunchy Con” of Andrew Sullivan’s
caliber—he does proud to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club combined. No
less a conservative than Joe Scarborough commiserated with actor Robert
Redford over the president’s “blind spot on the environment.” (Ditto
Bill O’Reilly.)
The other Bush initiative I endorsed was the attempt by Congress to
uphold Terri Schiavo’s inalienable right to life—a decision very many
conservatives now rue.
Upholding rights to life, liberty, and property is a government’s
primary—some would say only—duty. But, bless their cruel little hearts,
this cast of conservative characters is at least consistent. It relished
the launch of a bloody war in contravention of fact, law, and morality,
and now, fittingly, it’s atoning for its incongruent attempts to
forestall a killing.
In a pre-election postmortem in the Washington Post, former House
majority leader Dick Armey, in particular, castigated Republican
lawmakers for taking up trivia such as Terri, which he lumped with the
ban on horsemeat and the attempted bans on same-sex marriage and flag
burning.
Other Republicans have since expressed (or whinnied) similar
reservations, couched as a sudden disdain for government overreach. Note
to Dick and Andrew: Federalism means "divided sovereignty,” which, if we
are to take James Madison seriously, ought to make it difficult for
states to begin executing their citizens.
On one thing we can all agree, Schiavo, a human being who was neither
dead nor dying, was treated like horsemeat. As I wrote in “As
She Lay Dying,” her medical condition, clearly vegetative, was an
artifact, an irrelevancy to the main issue: the absence of a living will
or a clear directive from the woman herself. Her husband’s hearsay or a
court’s decision was not to be equated with her will. Since natural
rights antedate the state apparatus, nobody, other than Terry herself,
had the authority to extinguish her life. By logical extension, it
mattered not who upheld her negative right to life—state or federal
official—just so long as someone did.
Nat Hentoff agreed that “Terri Schiavo was fatally denied due process
because all the appellate courts, state and federal, relied wholly on
the rigid misunderstanding of the central facts of the case by one
Florida Circuit judge, George Greer.”
Dr. Thomas Szasz tosses and gores the lead hypocrites in the case:
In the Schiavo
controversy, the courts upheld the fiction that Terri's autonomy
required that she be medically killed, in her own best interest. In view
of the fact that we live in a country whose laws prohibit suicide and
often deny patients with terminal illnesses the pain-killers they need,
the doctors' and courts' sensitivities to patient autonomy were, in this
case, touching to say the least. Michael requested the court to
attribute to Terri the de facto right to physician-assisted suicide.
That this decision favored Michael's personal and financial interests,
and the taxpayers' economic interests, was purely coincidental.
Other
commentators approved the state-sanctioned starving of Schiavo, not
because she wanted it (which was the legal premise), but because they
deemed her unworthy of individual rights. These confused casuists
finessed poor reasoning and meager morals with convoluted and crude
attempts at a cut-off point, whereby a human being ceases to be a human
being, and henceforth can have his inalienable rights revoked by the
demiurges of science and state.
Terry’s
case is the litmus test for clear thinking, as evinced by Dr. Szasz’s
penetrating piece in the June-2006 issue of the international journal of
“Palliative and Supportive Care.” Titled "‘A Rose for Emily,' A Rose for
Terri: The Lifeless Body as Love Object and the Case of Theresa Marie
Schindler Schiavo," Dr. Szasz and I both share an appreciation for the
allegoric power of
William Faulkner.
Szasz is careful to dispel the libel perpetrated
by medical ethicists, mainstream media malpractitioners, and
Andrew-Sullivan conservatives, who “defined the case as a battle between
‘humanists’ and ‘religious zealots,’ ‘rationalists’ and
‘irrationalists,’ ignoring that there could be large numbers of people,
not all of whom could be categorized as ‘fundamentalists' or
‘evangelicals,' who were genuinely troubled by the ramifications of
viewing a life as inadequate and so deciding to end it.” To wit, Szasz
and myself are libertarian; Alan Dershowitz a liberal. He described
Michael Schiavo’s case as a thin reed and advanced a rights-based
argument in Terry’s defense.
“Most of the debate was straitjacketed into medical terminology and
dealt with concepts and issues such as the patient's ability to feel
pain, recognize persons, respond to stimuli, permanent vegetative state,
brain death, prognosis, rehabilitation, and so forth”—all shadowboxing,
says Szasz:
After more than a decade
of being half-dead, it required no sophisticated medical knowledge or
technology to conclude that, as a person, Terri Schiavo existed no
longer, but that, as a human being, she was still alive. That, after
all, is why there had been a long battle about the legitimacy of killing
her. She had to be put to death before she could be legally declared
dead and her corpse buried or cremated.
The Schindler’s mistake, contends Szasz, was to have “failed to
emphasize that what Theresa Schiavo allegedly wanted was unconfirmable,
based totally on hearsay evidence, and that, in doubtful cases, the long
tradition of English and American law and the Christian religion favors
the preservation of life and liberty over their forfeiture.”
Szasz stresses that “the principal issue in the Schiavo case—besides the
economics of Terri's care—was the conflict between two parties both
claiming undying love and loyalty to her: her husband who wanted her
dead, and her parents who wanted to keep her alive. In this
circumstance, the commandment against killing should alone have been
enough to tilt the balance in the parents' favor.”
Szasz conjures “the legendary case of the disputed baby in the Old
Testament,” as a metaphor for “the difference between the language of
love and life, and the language of envy and death; between the
philosophy of individualism and libertarianism, and the philosophy of
collectivism and statism; and between the ethics of justice and the
sanctity of life, and the ethics of bioethics and the justification for
medical killing.” Only in Schiavo vs. Schindler, the judge, lacking
Solomonic wisdom, gave the proverbial baby to the party that had vowed
to have her killed.
Things turned out well for Dick Armey and his ilk, after all.
©2006 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
November 17
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