Annie
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Links of course. Perhaps we should all say our prayers and trust in God...
http://www.donaldsensing.com/2005/03/schiavo-great-divide.html
http://www.donaldsensing.com/2005/03/schiavo-great-divide.html
Friday, March 25, 2005
The Schiavo great divide
It's obvious that arguments about Terri Schiavo fall into two main camps.
On the one hand are people who believe that the removal of Terri's feeding tube has been railroaded through the courts by hostile, adulterous husband Michael, who deperately wants Terri dead so he can make off with untold riches in newly-unhindered settlement money and life insurance. Michael, of course, actually injured Terri himself in the first place. Furthermore, Terri's condition is actually much better than a dozen or so doctors have testified under oath; their diagnosis that Terri is in a permanent vegetative state is simply wrong and the Florida courts have willfully ignored or rejected all evidence to the contrary. Likewise, the courts' rulings - that Terri herself had stated more than once, before her injury, that she would not want to be kept alive in such a condition - are unjust, flawed and based on bogus testimony by Michael and the two other persons who testified that they had heard Terri say so.
Hence, Terri is about to be murdered in a moral, if not technically legal, sense. Therefore, any measure is justified in restoring her feeding tube, including federal intervention or, as Gov. Jeb Bush was considering yesterday, taking Terri into state custody.
On the other hand are people who trust that the PVS diagnosis is valid, having been confirmed multiple times, that the Florida courts followed both the letter and intent of Florida law governing such cases, including ruling that the burden of proof was met in showing that Terri had uttered statements that she would not want to be kept alive in her condition. People on this side may agree that Michael Schiavo is no paragon of virtue, but also acknowledge that allegations regarding his actions and motives were exhaustively explored by investigators and the courts and that no facts were found sufficient either to implicate him as a cause of Terri's condition or to impeach his testimony about Terri's pre-injury statements or the testimony of the other five persons who so testified.
This group believes that the Florida courts have handled this case properly, if not perfectly, and that there is no justification for federal intervention or unilateral executive intervention by Gov. Bush.
Not everyone in either camp cleaves to every point of the descriptions I make, but most substantially do as far as I can tell. We need to acknowledge that these two camps cannot be reconciled.
Obviously, as some of you are so shocked to learn, I place myself in the second group. According to America's talk-radio pontificator-in-chief, Rush Limbaugh, I am therefore both "liberal" and "in love with a culture of death," not to mention that I "want Terri Schiavo to die."
Characterizing adherents of my position that way certainly came as a surprise to radio host Neal Boortz, whose latest book is entitled, The Terrible Truth About Liberals, and who wrote on Townhall.com that he agrees the tube should have been removed. Rush's claim also excommunicated Nashville radio host and former Republican candidate for Congress Steve Gill, who said on his show yesterday that the removal of the tube was correct.
Let me try to restate my position as clearly as I can:
Matters relating to situations such as these have always been governed under state laws. As a resident of Tennessee, I have no standing to tell the people of Florida that their laws are either unjust or incorrectly applied by their state courts. I may believe that, or not, but I have no standing to intervene in the internal affairs of another state by means of the federal government.
The notoriety of the Terri Schiavo case does not give me that justification.
Doubtless some of you will protest that I am binding myself by needless, cold-hearted legalism and that in order to conform to mere federalist principles I am willing to let Terri be cruelly murdered by judicial fiat.
To which I reply in three parts:
1. Terri is not being murdered. The Florida courts found, in multiple rulings, that Terri had met the requirements of Florida law for a living will. I have no legal standing to overturn that ruling. Lacking any independent means to assess the validity of the evidence or judges' rulings, it is not possible for me logically or coherently to run roughshod over years and years of judges' conclusions reached in open hearings in which all sides were given unfettered opportunity to state their cases and cross-examine witnesses. The courts' rulings were not fiat nor were they perverse.
Please do not start filling my comment box and email with "But what about" objections. These objections are not the ones Terri's parents are raising through their lawyers, which in my mind speaks volumes about their worth.
Everything I have learned about this case leads me to conclude that Terri's condition is irreversible and that she had legitimately expressed a desire not to be kept alive in such a state even if only by a feeding tube rather than full-up "life support" as typically defined. That's where the facts lead, and to conclude otherwise is to engage in fantasy, to reinvent the facts and circumstances of the past 15 years for reasons that frankly seem to have little to do with Terri or her family, and almost everything to do with reinforcing one's own self-image or political position - especially that the courts can't be trusted and Florida courts most of all.
2. I consider the right of a person to determine the extent of his or her own medical treatment to be too valuable to be shattered simply because this case has become notorious - and I assure you, that is the only reason anyone is interested in it outside Terri's actual family. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of cases where persons are unable to nourish themselves but have pre-determined that they do not want to be fed by a tube, and therefore they die. Shall Terri's so-called advocates butt into them as well? (My own grandmother was one of them, nine years ago.)
Therefore, not only do I have no legal basis to intervene in Florida's procedures, I have no moral standing to trump Terri's personal decision, even if I disagree with it, or to barge into the tragedy for her family that it entails, except to offer prayers and empathy for the ordeal they are having to endure.
3. I stand by my earlier claim that there is no case to be made for federal intervention. As Glenn Reynolds says,
I'm quite astonished to hear people who call themselves conservatives arguing, in effect, that Congress and the federal courts have a free-ranging charter to correct any injustice, anywhere, regardless of the Constitution.
Furthermore, it is worth considering the words of Justice Antonin Scalia in his concurring opinion in Cruzan v. Director, MDH, 1990, a landmark case that closely mirrors the Schiavo case:
[T]he federal courts have no business in this field; that American law has always accorded the State the power to prevent, by force if necessary, suicide - including suicide by refusing to take appropriate measures necessary to preserve one's life; that the point at which life becomes "worthless," and the point at which the means necessary to preserve it become "extraordinary" or "inappropriate," are neither set forth in the Constitution nor known to the nine Justices of this Court any better than they are known to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory; and hence, that even when it is demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that a patient no longer wishes certain measures to be taken to preserve her life, it is up to the citizens of Missouri to decide, through their elected representatives, whether that wish will be honored. It is quite impossible (because the Constitution says nothing about the matter) that those citizens will decide upon a line less lawful than the one we would choose; and it is unlikely (because we know no more about "life-and-death" than they do) that they will decide upon a line less reasonable.
The text of the Due Process Clause does not protect individuals against deprivations of liberty simpliciter. It protects them against deprivations of liberty "without due process of law." To determine that such a deprivation would not occur if Nancy Cruzan were forced to take nourishment against her will, it is unnecessary to reopen the historically recurrent debate over whether "due process" includes substantive restrictions.
This is an important opinion because Cruzan's case was almost identical with Schiavo's, and also because Scalia dismissed the idea that personal autonomy - for Cruzan as well as Schiavo, the right to refuse treatment including a feeding tube - was much relevant at all, living will or not. But he went on to explain,
I assert only that the Constitution has nothing to say about the subject. To raise up a constitutional right here, we would have to create out of nothing (for it exists neither in text nor tradition) some constitutional principle whereby, although the State may insist that an individual come in out of the cold and eat food, it may not insist that he take medicine; and although it may pump his stomach empty of poison he has ingested, it may not fill his stomach with food he has failed to ingest. Are there, then, no reasonable and humane limits that ought not to be exceeded in requiring an individual to preserve his own life? There obviously are, but they are not set forth in the Due Process Clause. What assures us that those limits will not be exceeded is the same constitutional guarantee that is the source of most of our protection - what protects us, for example, from being assessed a tax of 100% of our income above the subsistence level, from being forbidden to drive cars, or from being required to send our children to school for 10 hours a day, none of which horribles is categorically prohibited by the Constitution. Our salvation is the Equal Protection Clause, which requires the democratic majority to accept for themselves and their loved ones what they impose on you and me. This Court need not, and has no authority to, inject itself into every field of human activity where irrationality and oppression may theoretically occur, and if it tries to do so, it will destroy itself.
Here I stand, I can do no other.
Update: See also my posts, "Pastoring families of the hopelessly ill," and the United Methodist Church's doctrinal statement on "Faithful Care for Persons Suffering and Dying," which fills in some of the theological space about my position on this issue.
I truly believe that they were procedurally and constitutionally correct. As to fallout - who knows? President Bush stuck to his guns in the face of some pretty daunting poll figures during the campaign - so, we shall see, I guess.
