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Is
Florida
Run By Sadists?
by
Allen Snyder
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It’s
not comforting to learn that the compassion in ‘compassionate
conservatism’ is as dead in Jeb Bush’s
Florida
as it is in George Bush’s
Washington
. The recent action taken by
Governor Bush and the
Florida
State
legislature in the case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged and comatose
young woman, is reprehensible to the core.
Only if ‘compassion’ means ‘not giving a hoot in hell about
Terri Schiavo’ are they being really
compassionate, since they appear to care about her even less than that.
The
protests by praying and genuflecting believers, religious ‘moral
experts’, and right-wing Christian organizations were designed
explicitly to shame Gov. Bush and need-to-be-reelected members of the
State legilsature into action. Predictably,
they caved and passed a knee-jerk piece of legislative nonsense requiring
Ms. Schiavo’s doctors to reinsert a feeding tube that was legally
removed six days earlier (she was to die in 7 and 10 days,) effectively
turning her into a political tool.
This
trumped-up law was meant to circumvent the courts who, based on solid
legal precedent, would have denied any appeal and allowed Ms. Schiavo to
die (By starvation! Yuck!
Wouldn’t a lethal injection be more humane!?).
It was also conveniently written to apply to Ms. Schiavo’s case
alone. I guess the legal
scumbags in Gov. Bush’s office learned much from the Supreme
Embarrassment’s employment of the same bogus and constitutionally
suspect strategy in Gore v. Bush.
A
large part of the public, hopped up mostly on emotion, is OK with Bush’s
decision to side with Ms. Schiavo’s family rather than her husband.
However, their sympathy is misplaced – not because they’re
giving it to the family (who certainly deserve it), but because they’re not
giving it to Ms. Schiavo.
Sadly,
thanks to poor media coverage, the public is woefully ignorant of relevant
facts. With CNN’s
conflicting accounts of Ms. Schiavo’s condition, it’s no wonder.
In the course of one day last week, their headline ticker referred
to her first as being in a ‘persistent vegetative state’, then in a
‘coma’, and finally, in a ‘come-like’ state.
Call me crazy, but these sound significantly different.
As it turns out, they are, but nobody bothered to clear it up.
Since
Ms. Schiavo is not brain-dead (she’s exhibiting behaviors that could be
construed as intentional), it’s disingenuous to say she is in a PVS
(persistent vegetative state), which refers to a very serious form of coma
where the patient shows little to no response, but is still just this side
of death (the Nancy Cruzan case from 1990 is a good example).
Ms. Schiavo’s condition, however, appears
more like Karen Ann Quinlan’s, the coma patient whose case ignited a
public and legal furor over her respirator’s removal in the 70’s and
80’s (she had some rather gruesome involuntary responses).
Ms.
Schiavo’s family lawyers have nevertheless pulled out all the stops to
keep her alive. The loop of
footage CNN’s Headline News constantly
runs is transparently skewed toward the view that Ms. Schiavo is partially
conscious, voluntarily responding to stimuli, can be physically
rehabilitated, and even taught to eat on her own.
No offense, guys, but
I’d like to see what she’s doing the other 99.9% of her day.
If
it were the least bit realistic, this familial prognosis could be taken
seriously. But all the
medicos involved are saying Ms. Schiavo’s condition is irreversible and
beyond hope. Barring divine
intervention or a healing, Benny Hinn-like slap on the head, Ms. Schiavo
will stay comatose until the end.
In
case their legal end-run wasn’t bad enough, an unsympathetic judge
refused to grant an immediate injunction against the action, thereby
giving doctors enough time to further desecrate Ms. Schiavo by first
re-hydrating her, then reinserting her feeding tube.
The
Florida
government’s willful politicization of Ms. Schiavo at the expense of her
right to die, her privacy, her due process, and the respect of
Florida
judiciary decisions is shameful.
There
is a reason that courts consistently uphold the surrogate wishes of
spouses over other immediate family.
And we don’t have to look any further than the reasons given by
the parties involved to see why. While
the husband argues that Ms. Schiavo would not have wanted to live in her
condition, I have yet to see where the family has expressed anything but
their own understandable desires not to see Ms. Schiavo die.
The family’s reasoning seems selfish and thoroughly clouded by
wishful thinking and deep denial, both of which were unjustly validated by
the lege’s actions.
Eventually,
a court will uphold Ms. Schiavo’s right to die and her feeding tube will
again be removed. About ten
days later, she’ll die of starvation and dehydration.
Thankfully, she’ll never know the humiliation of having been a
political martyr for a cause she didn’t believe in.
She’ll only have suffered unnecessarily for it.
How’s
that for compassion?
Allen Snyder is an
instructor of Philosophy and Ethics. He can be reached at asnyder111@hotmail.com
This
article is copyright by Allen Snyder and originally
published by opednews.com but
permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so
long as this credit is attached.
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