The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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March 21, 2005
Congressional Zombies Feeding on Terri Schiavo's Corpse Dear Congress: Please mind your own damned business. Leave the Schiavo family alone.
Who in hell do you presumptuous SOBs think you are? Let me be more specific. What part of your legal mandate, the US Constitution, gives you legal authority to interfere with particular individuals specific private medical decisions? By what authority do you overrule the state courts in this matter?
Moreover, who are you to tell someone that they have to endure endless years of being a vegetable atrophying on a hospital bed? What crime did Terri Schiavo commit in her years of conscious life to merit this endlessly slow deterioration being forced upon her by some damned politicians?
I'm particularly sickened by the ghoulishness of your gimmick of subpoenaing Terri Schiavo. On what topic in particular do they expect Ms Schiavo to testify? It's as if life has turned into a particularly gruesome episode of South Park.
As of Monday am, 3-21-2005, the Congress has got a deal worked out (coming in for a super rare out of session session) passing a bill plucking this one particular case absolutely arbitrarily out of the jurisdiction of Florida state courts and plopping it into federal court, where they think they can get the result they want, with special standing arbitrarily granted to her parents. Thus the title of the bill: "Relief of the Parents of Theresa Marie Schiavoz."
Yet, if you woodburned a copy of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the US Constitution onto a baseball bat, and then used it to try to knock some respect for the Constitution into these people's heads it would come out as if YOU were the bad guy.
Congressional Republican leadership has been leading the whoring on this issue, though most of Congress appears only too happy to go along. President Bush has been right in the middle of this whoring, too. This is because they have a big bunch of boobs mostly all worked up on the "pro-life" side of this.
This case seems to be marked as the "pro-life" cause of the millenium, and no pollitician wants to be on the other side of this. I blame all of the public that is putting pressure on Congressmen to act irrationally and illegally.
Usually reasonable, conservative folks are losing their minds here. The whole National Review crew seems to be on board, cheerleading. Even the uber-calm Peggy Noonan has been reduced to talking out of her head.
"Bill Frist and Tom DeLay and Jim Sensenbrenner and Denny Hastert and all the rest would be better off risking looking ridiculous and flying down to Florida, standing outside Terri Schiavo's room and physically restraining the poor harassed staff who may be told soon to remove her feeding tube, than standing by in Washington, helpless and tied in legislative knots, and doing nothing."
This just looks like hysterical jabbering from someone almost always calm and reasonable. What are you thinking?
Besides anything else, I fail to see how forcing Terri Schiavo to keep breathing constitutes being "pro-life." She's not there. The human part is long gone. Wanting to save unborn children from being aborted so that they can have their chance to play in the sunshine- that's pro-life. Forcing the continued matinence of the unconscious brain stem functions of an atrophied corpse, however, is not furthering anyone's life or respect for life in any discernible way.
Terri Schiavo died many years ago. "We laugh together, we cry together, we smile together, we talk together," said Mary Schindler, the mother, this weekend. People have been understandably deferential to the grieving mother, but this statement is simply a lie. Terri can no longer do any of those things. Elvis has long since left the building. If you poke her face right, you might occassionally get a reflexive muscular action. That does not in any real sense of the word constitute "smiling," much less talking.
You'd think that if these evangelical types pushing this circus really believed in their Jesus the way that they claim, they'd want to release this woman to finally go meet him, rather than keeping her trapped in this hellish limbo.
If you treated your dog like this, it would be cruelty to animals. Any decent person would have mercy on the creature under their care, and put it down quietly. Mrs Schindler knows this. Her actions surely have much to do with her own celebrity. The crowds and the sympathy must be very rewarding to Mary Schindler, but she damn well knows that it's not benefitting her daughter in the least.
Instead, now the husband gets set up to be the bad guy, wanting to starve her to death. Simple euthanasia would be much more humane, but even a couple of weeks of starvation isn't nearly so bad as another who knows how many more years of laying helpless and unconscious in a hospice. There's so little of her brain left though, that the starvation probably barely registers if at all.
Schmucks have been out protesting the husband's residence, as if he were the bad guy rather than the responsible husband trying to take care of the wife's wishes and better interest.
Many have argued that he should just give the parents what they want, get a divorce and let the parents play with her corpse as long as they want. Considering the extraordinary pressures brought against him, that abandonment would certainly have been WAY the easier path. Instead, he has rather heroically stood up against a great deal of public, legal and political pressure to try to do right by his late wife.
Dark innuendo circles Michael Schiavo because he supposedly has another woman and family now. Even the hacks at Fox News have tiptoed around the idea, but wanting to move on with life opens him to evil rumor.
But he's got the right idea if that's what he's in fact done. Life is for the living. His wife's been gone for 15 years.
By any rights, the medical decisions for Terri Schiavo's corpse belong rightfully to her husband. If he had decided to push this artificial sustenance on her indefinitely, as Congress seems intent on, then people of compassion would perhaps lament the half dead corpse being put through these continuing indignities. However, the husband would be within rights to make the decision, even if it weren't the decision I'd make. Fortunately, he's acted more responsibly.
Congress doesn't get to just do anything they want whenever they want to whomever they they wish to do it to. They are not in fact czars charged with micromanaging even our deaths.
Why don't you bastards just mind your own damned business?
