In the left-hand column I’ve added a feed for Blogsfor Terri.com, a sort of clearing house for people concerned about Terri Schiavo. From videos it appears she’s not in a “persistent vegetative state” as defined by Florida law. The local courts have been ruling she has to go, though, with the support of the ACLU and the New York Times and the acquiescence of her bishop. Unless something happens soon they’ll be removing the feeding tube, and she’ll die of hunger and thirst.
Why do things like this happen? Nat Hentoff thinks a lot of it is refusal on the part of the media to look at what’s happening and report it accurately. It seems to me that’s right, and the reason is that current law tries to insist that everything is either a private taste or something that can be handled adequately by either contract or a bureaucratic administrator. As a result, it can’t handle the most basic issues—life, death, sex, religion and so on. Liberals have to pretend there are no problems in connection with those things, everything can be taken care of in a rational efficient mechanical way, and the only problem is that there are weird people with obsessions who have to be laughed off and ignored. All the handwringing about “complex and difficult issues” serves no function other than to eliminate the possibility of public discussion and bring about a simple rationalized process that puts everything in the hands of someone who decides as he chooses.
Let’s hope the internet makes it ever easier to poke holes in the media iron curtain. Better, let’s help make that happen. Sign the petition posted in the forum or do something else to support Mrs. Schiavo.
Experts and the Law
Bill Oreilly justified the mass murder of Ms. Schiavo on the basis of a supposed expert physician. The supposed expert said an important portion of her brain had been replaced by cerebrospinal fluid and, therefore, could never support an improvement in her mental abilities. So that’s it. This illustrates Mr. Kalb’s point that our liberal society relies on experts or logic or both, depending on which way they want to go.
I suspect many people are unaware of the degree of reliance that our elites (such as Mr. Oreilly) place on experts, when it suits them. Experts, people with special knowledge, fill our courts, legislatures, and executive departments with conflicting testimony. Worsening the situation is our experts are taught by the elite and picked by the elite. Yet our experts are often wrong.
As a result, we have many brainwashed people cheering on an evil husband trying to kill his wife so he can keep using his wife’s money to help keep he and his concubine happy.
Floridian Experts v. Ms. Shiavo
I forgot to mention the theory, thought of by a smarter close relative when I explained the legal issues, that money is Mr. Schiavo’s motive for killing his wife. The money he obtained on her account is not just his but hers. If, through a surrogate, she obtained a divorce from Mr. Schiavo, there would need to be a property settlement. The money included money for her future medical care; her proportion of the money, therefore, dwarfs any money meant for “his suffering” and “loss” of sexual intimacy. Mr. Schiavo would profit if she were dead: he would inherit.
He would inherit since it is likely she died with a will leaving him her money or without a will and Florida considers the spouse (in the absence of children) the primary heir. The Schiavo’s have no children. He could not inherit if she obtained a divorce.
One must question the competency of Ms. Schiavo’s legal counsel. Unless a friend or a relative or a court appointee in Florida cannot sue for divorce on her behalf, I cannot see why a divorce has not been granted on the grounds of abandonment or adultery or both.
Considering the wrongness of the “legal experts” on the Florida Supreme Court, I suppose legal competency does not matter when the Court is involved. Are not Supreme Court justice’s supposed to be expert in the law? Yes, but the Court couldn’t articulate, from among infinite volumes of legal writings, a plausible reason for disallowing the 2000 election results.
What is a mass-murder of
What is a mass-murder of one?
Anyway, I almost hate to admit agreeing with Bill O’Reilly on anything, but in this case, he and the experts were correct, and the Right-to-Lifers were wrong.
-x
huge, interesting debate on the Schiavo case over at Chronicles:
See http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/hardright.cgi/Never_Say_Die.writeback here…