Still busy, but I wanted to direct your attention to this article by Eric Boehlert. It's in Salon so non-subscribers will have to watch an ad or something if they want to read it. But it claims something about the Terri Schiavo case that I hadn't realized. (That's assuming it's true. If it isn't, I would imagine it would be pretty easy to rebut by citing the correct numbers.) Here are two key paragraphs…
Recent polling data, in outlets from Fox News to the Washington Post, shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans back the position of Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband, that he, and not his wife's parents, should have the final say about removing the feeding tube of his wife, who has been severely brain-damaged and incapacitated for the past 15 years. The polling data seriously undercuts the notion that Americans are deeply divided on the Schiavo case. Yet ever since March 18, when Republicans began their unprecedented push to intervene legislatively in a state court case that had already been heard by 19 judges, the press has all but disregarded the polls.
The Schiavo episode highlights not only how far to the right the GOP-controlled Congress has lunged — a 2003 Fox News poll found just 2 percent of Americans think the government should decide this type of right-to-die issue — but also how paralyzed the mainstream press has become in pointing out the obvious: that the GOP leadership often operates well outside the mainstream of America. The press's timidity is important because publicizing the poll results might extend the debate from one that focuses exclusively on a complicated moral and ethical dilemma to one that also examines just how far a radical and powerful group of religious conservatives are willing to go to push their political beliefs on the public.
I'm guessing that if you polled people on the question of whether Congress should decide who wins on American Idol, more than 2% would think that was appropriate. So is there any reason the Schiavo matter is in Congress at all?
My gut is split two ways on this matter, though neither thinks most of the folks riding the Terri Schiavo bandwagon are out to do anything but demonstrate their power and/or fealty to the Religious Right. On the one side, I think there is a state-level process in place that decides this kind of thing and that Ms. Schiavo's defenders have shown no reason to depart from that process, other than that they don't like what it has repeatedly determined. The other side says that we should err on the side of compassion and giving "life" (such as it may be in her case) the benefit of the doubt. But even there, I don't think that should stop with Terri Schiavo. If we're going to do everything possible to keep her breathing, let's make the same effort for everyone else whose death could perhaps be prevented with more human effort. One Republican I saw on C-Span the other night made what I'm sure he didn't intend as a great argument for National Health Care and increases in Medicaid, Medicare and access to cheaper prescription drugs. Or is anyone out there so disingenuous as to deny that people who are much more "alive" and salvageable than Terri Schiavo die due to lack of affordable health care and medicine?
I kinda like a lot of what I'm hearing from the G.O.P. about denying "the culture of death" and about doing everything we can to prolong life. I just think it oughta apply to everyone who might actually be helped instead of just one poor lady who, sad to say, is probably never going to get any better…and maybe didn't even want this kind of "help."