the Centrist

One cannot help but wonder if Terri Schiavo’s last name were Reeves … if she were but a movie star … or a pope … would she still be fighting for her life? Perhaps a more pertinent question would be if she so ‘wanted to die’ why did she fight so hard? If she was going so peacefully, why did she need morphine? According to the pundits this was supposed to be a painless death … one ‘embraced’ by Terri . The fact that she was still responsive and still fighting after 14 days of starvation and dehydration screams to the rational that she did want to live … and that was the mitigating circumstance in which Judge Greer and his judicial cronies made their decision. Yet the erudite judicial, not unlike the Pharisees of old, seemed to scream: ‘Terri must die’. They did not reason that she had received the proper medical attention and or tests, rather that she had received the proper judicial process.
While we watched as those Gestapo like guards ‘protected’ her from gaining access to water … and as their last act, obstructed her loved one (siblings) from spending the last moments on earth with her … the judiciary reined with their form of justice … mercy be damned.
Anxious to get on with his new life with his common law wife and two children, her ‘guardian’ husband did all to assure her death. What could be his motive? Perhaps their was a life insurance policy with ‘husband’ as benefactor? Does he have a book deal? Just what can his motivation be to have won funds for rehabilitation, then, contrary to Rev. Jackson’s statements, use them not for treatment, but for attorney fees to assure her demise? Not only did this attorney lobby the courts to kill her, but also not allow an autopsy. When it was pointed out that Florida law insists on an autopsy for those who are to be cremated he acquiesce … as if he had a choice. As of this date he is still refusing calling hours, a funeral mass, or even a Catholic burial.
The accusations have been made, and supposedly sealed medical records reveal, that she had several broken bones upon admission some 15 years ago. These fractures included broken ribs and vertebrae, as well as a broken femur. The same records claim to expose the likely cause of her brain damage to be strangulation and the cause of the fractures as ‘traumatic’ (Fox News ‘Hannity and Colmes’). An autopsy will be conclusive. If the findings are negative they would prove Michael (her husband) has gone down this ever so cruel path for what some may call ‘altruistic’, albeit twisted, reasoning.
Yet nothing has been resolved with Terri’s death. Since the ‘pro-life’ politicians have proven they are more afraid of poles than Italians … their moral imperative is now a mute point. These politicians set up a scenario to appear to have done ‘everything they could’ … then held their collective fingers in the air to see what would earn them the most votes. What they did not count on is the emasculation of their base. What had been the encouragement of the past election may just have turned to apathy. Last November they rallied those who claim to value integrity with a promise that only they would ‘do the right thing’. Well this was their first test, and this President and Congress failed miserably. The base of the Republican Party stood by haplessly as the process became more important than the result and Terri was executed in such a crule and unusual way. We watched Congress scramble to make sense out of this disaster, then pull back when it appeared unpopular. Moreover, the ‘capital’ this President earned, as far as this voter is concerned, was just spent … and it was wasted on an inane cowardly attempt to appease the left. He will no longer be viewed in the same light and tragically, as a result, many will no longer believe any in the political arena have a claim to ‘morality’. It has not been lost on this columnist that either Executive Bush could have saved Terri Schiavo with the stroke of their pen … if they only had the courage of their claimed conviction.