Imagine that tomorrow, you suffer a cerebral hemorrhage, and by the time that you can be treated, all your higher brain functions have been damaged beyond repair. You have told your spouse that you want them to make the decision in that situation, to make the call as to what is right given the situation. And after a great time of grief, and argument, and even trips to court, your spouse makes arrangements to do what they think is right: they ask the doctors to pull the plug, as they believe you would have wanted.<\/p>\n
And then, before the doctors can act, the government interposes itself to keep you alive. And not just the government, but the United States Congress and the President of the United States themselves, calling your beloved spouse a murderer and worse, saying that they’re doing it for you.<\/p>\n
It is the ultimate imposition, the government stepping in and interjecting itself into the deepest and most personal decisions, decisions that have no business being made by impersonal fools making diagnoses from Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
The federal government decided, for reasons I will never understand, to get involved in the horrible, wrenching decision of a husband to end life support for his wife. And the results were horiffic. Mercifully, the American people saw the actions as they were, and rose up in fury. The American courts reacted properly, and threw the case out. And Terri Schiavo was finally given the rest that she deserved.<\/p>\n
But for a brief moment, we got to see the America the fundamentalists and the firebreathers dream of, an America in which intimate and personal decisions are subject to the whims of authority. It is the nightmare vision that animates the right, from the abstinence-only movement to the anti-choice movement to the anti-gay movement, all played out at Terri Schiavo’s deathbed. It was a reminder of how fragile our liberties are — and how so, so many Americans see no value in liberty at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imagine that tomorrow, you suffer a cerebral hemorrhage, and by the time that you can be treated, all your higher brain functions have been damaged beyond repair. You have told your spouse that you want them to make the decision … Continue reading