The War on Terri---Aftermath

More reflections on what it all means:

Reid Collins laments the death of fidelity:

So, much of America received the news of Schiavo's death as one who has been shot at and missed, relief at the whine of a bullet making its way harmlessly into the brush of life. That was close. But now we can join F. Scott's boats against the current and never mind the tide that's taking us. Into the past? There was one. It was filled with pledges: "In sickness and in health...until death us do part." "Love, honor..."

Fully fifty percent of those repeating such phrases in America today will one day wish them unsaid, and will have them undone. So is it a wonder, this talk on the subways, buses, and ferryboats, that this man was only doing what comes naturally and yet fought fiercely to maintain suzerainty over that personage to whom, after all, he had made pledges. Adultery? Piffle. This, too, is a matter of personal choice and hasn't the highest court in the land come down on the side of choice in a related matter? Besides, what standing does a vegetable have as a complainant in a divorcement lawsuit?

Lawrence Henry knows how many Americans are on "life support"---he's one of them:

So here I am in Terri Schiavo days, and you will forgive me if in this whole intense storm I feel a whole lot more like a target than an advocate. With every dialysis treatment, I feel better, and I am grateful to be restored to my family in better shape than I have been for a long time.

Am I on life support? I suppose I am. Long before the Schiavo case broke on the national scene, when I felt at my worst, as I thumbed through a file on my desk, I found the health-care proxy I had signed before my second transplant. A health-care proxy is of course not a living will. Nonetheless, moved by some impulse I did not then understand, I tore it up. I find myself quite reluctant to sign another.

James Bowman laments the loss of Christian honor:

It's one of those moments when the abyss seems to open up at one's feet. There is no surprise, of course, in the fact that a judge should have affirmed the right of a husband with an obvious interest in getting his wife out of the way to starve her to death just because she is prevented by illness from protesting about it. The ugly fiction of "choice" as the justification for appalling barbarity towards the innocent and helpless has never been more naked, but it has always been pretty apparent to anyone with eyes to see. No, what is shocking, what makes some of us wonder what kind of barbaric world we suddenly find ourselves living in, is the apparent majority of Americans -- a large majority, we are told by the pollsters -- who are quite happy that what has now been done to poor Mrs. Schiavo should have been done to her. And presumably to others in her situation.

Of course it may be the case that Americans have become so desensitized by 30-plus years of legal abortion-on-demand that the brutalization of the culture which opponents of such license have long predicted is already upon us. To some extent, we must be aware that this is true, and the media's treatment of what amounts to legally mandated murder can be evidence of nothing else. The ever reliable Tina Brown wrote in the Washington Post on the day of Terri's death that "It's become downright harrowing to live in the crucible of these hourly Passion plays. The endlessly repeated tape loop of Terri's gaping mouth has become as ubiquitous as Starbucks..." Downright harrowing, eh? Poor Tina! How hard Terri's slow death is for her! But I think that a significant proportion of the majority who are supposed to think that the courts were right to give her husband the right to kill Terry Schiavo are not really saying that. Instead, they're saying that they are tough guys (and gals) and they don't want the world to think they're squeamish or wimpish.

Yeah, Michael Schiavo's tough all right---tough enough to dehydrate a disabled woman to death so he can take whatever's left of the settlement after paying off his scumbag lawyer and move to Rio. A regular Gary Cooper.

George Neumayr decries the "humane holocaust":

The initial event that disabled Terri Schiavo didn't end up killing her. But in her obituary notice, what will the cause of death read? Will it read: murder? It should. The heart attack that disabled her didn't doom her; a husband without a heart did.

Under judge-made law, euthanasia has become America's most astonishing form of premeditated murder, a cold-blooded crime in which husbands can kill their wives and even turn them into accomplices to it through the telepathy of "their wishes." To wonder if we're on the slippery slope sounds like an obtuse moral compliment at this point. The truth is we're at the bottom of the slope and have been for quite some time, standing dumbly as the bodies of innocent humans pile up around us. As we sift through them -- puzzling over how they got so numerous -- we're reduced to mumbling sophistries about compassion and consent.

This is the "humane holocaust" of which Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, a culture that kills the weak, from deaf unborn children to mute disabled women, and calls it mercy. Those responsible for this humane holocaust look into the mirror and see Gandhi, but it is Hitler who glances back. If someone had taken the passages of Mein Kampf that speak of euthanizing "unfortunates" and inserted them into the columns from newspapers and magazines cheering Schiavo's death, would anyone have known the difference?

The Nazi analogy is thrown about far too easily. America is not Hitlerite Germany. However, some Americans fail to see the maw of evil so clearly before them, the natural implications of every drip of convenience which so slightly erodes the rock of courage and righteousness. Besides, the signature characteristic of the Nazi is the the coldblooded willingness to murder the "unfit". The analogy in this case is not a non sequitur.

To counter the Left's death-cult, we need to rekindle the love of life which naturally resides within every breast, however faint the embers now. With Terri Schiavo's sad passing, and perhaps that of Pope John Paul II, I predict we'll all be tending the fire more carefully in the coming days.