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Saturday, March 26, 2005

Whittemore rules against saving Terri again

Federal Judge Whittemore denies the Schindlers' petition for a second time. You would think that he'd be prudent, what with new evidence coming up which Governor Bush considers to require serious reconsideration of the whole case. I don't know if the democrats or the pro-death-to-Terri crowd are just so engrossed with opposing anything that is supported by US President Bush. I know that lots of folks from that crowd have been raving about the federal bill at the 11th hour for Terri -- citing political maneuverings by the GOP. But in ignoring the Schindler's pleas for their daughter Terri, and by ignoring the serious issues raised by those pleas, they have shown themselves to be even worse. Their ranting and raving IS political maneuvering, but it's also kneejerk reaction, so in fact they're just reacting. I once postulated at another blog a simple theory about why this whole thing is happening. The furor over Terri's execution by starvation and dehydration is deliberate. The rhetoric about its painlessness is part of the plan. What plan? The whole thing is designed to raise the specter of a painful and lingering death for the disabled. The result is a wide swing in sympathy for euthanasia. If they succeed in killing Terri this way, they may also pave the way for making America the largest nation where euthanasia is practiced legally. From there they can start exporting that across other countries, perhaps through the United Nations. They will probably use the same tactics as with population control: First, they make the case, through sensationalization of the population problem, that birth rates must be controlled. Next, they aggressively market population control programs with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars -- that includes providing the supply of artificial contraceptives, on top of providing suppliers to SELL additional contraceptives, of course. In the case of euthanasia, they're already making the case, one western country after the other, that there's a demographic problem of not enough labor and tax revenues to support an aging population. They're already marketing euthanasia in those same countries, and what a coincidence, it would seem to alleviate the burden on governments for the care of an aging population. I shudder at the thought of these as I write these words, but God help me, they actually make sense. God have mercy on us.

1 comment:

Jeff Tan said...

Simple response to that: what has one got to do with the other?

Longer response: If you're suggesting that we should stop caring about the injustice perpetrated against one woman since there is a greater injustice to the sheer number of casualties of the Iraqi war, then why stop there? Why not stop obsessing about the Iraqi war altogether and obsess instead about the even greater injustice of genocide perpetrated -- unchallenged -- in Darfur? It's not a matter of saying "my issue is greater than your issue" because that implies going after one injustice at a time, i.e., don't move on to the next one until the previous one has been completely addressed.

Besides which the Terri Schiavo case goes beyond Terri Schiavo herself. Her parents and siblings, her husband, the possible murder attempts against Terri, including perhaps the cause for her 1990 collapse, her husband's lawyer and his conflict of interest as chair of the board of directors for Terri's hospice, the $15 million Medicaid fraud investigation against that hospice, the Medicaid fraud investigation against hospices in the state of Florida amounting between $700 million to $1.4 billion, the judge who appears to have broken the law many times in ramming a death sentence for Terri down everybody's throat, the possible conspiracy involving DCF officials -- these are all in Terri's fight and beyond Terri herself.

And if you can't see in her plight the potential for a barbaric treatment of the weakest in our society -- sufferers of dementia including Alzheimer's, babies born with physical imperfections, fetuses conceived with physical imperfections, quadraplegics -- then you should really dig deeper.