A few days after her murder commenced, I lost hope, and said so in Goodbye, Terri. The reasons why are made plain in the article. The Law - is it dead yet? is an inconclusive rumination on the relationship between legality and morality.
After it was all over (the Pope, too, having finished his course), I said my last goodbyes.
Others held up their end as well. I came across three letters from three ladies responding to a post-murder article in First Things entitled "The Legal Death of Terri Schiavo," by Robert Miller, in which we were assured that all had proceeded according to law. The result was unfortunate, but the fault was ours, or the Culture of Death, or something, not that of the courts. They simply ruled on the laws in place, which were put there by someone else. As I was reading the ladies' letters, I thought, "These gals are sharp. I like'em." And one of them turned out to be Lydia McGrew of Right Reason and my partner at the now defunct Enchiridion Militis. (You'll have to scroll to the bottom to read these letters and Miller's response.) Lydia makes an extremely cogent point toward the end of hers about judicial activism, contra Miller's claim that the legal proceedings, especially on the federal level, did not involve such activism, and I think his response to her is weak.
One of the other ladies observes that
Apparently none of them [the judges] found it unconscionable that Schiavo should be put to death in this manner. Could they not have followed the voice of conscience that so many other judges claim to hear when they override laws passed by the representatives of the people, as activist judges have been doing for the past thirty years?
to which Miller responds in part:In a case like Terri Schiavo’s, the temptation to ignore the law is strong, but we need to keep our heads and remember that the fundamental principles of our system of government serve very large interests, interests larger even than the life or death of a single individual. This, incidentally, is why men have been willing to die for these principles.
This is a tacit admission that the separation of powers is more important in principle than preventing the murder of a single individual. We musn't lower ourselves to the other side's tactics. They may lose their heads, but we must keep ours. This was the same line taken by a shorter, less legalistically precise offering in Touchstone in July of that year, the claim that judicial activism to save Terri would have been morally equivalent to the kind that gave us Roe v. Wade, to which I responded with a letter of outrage. It was published, but is not available online, and I've never posted it here. Maybe I should. We'll see how I feel in a few days.Could they not have followed the voice of conscience? That lady's question still awaits an answer. Yes ma'am, they could have. But first you've got to have one to follow, or, if you do, the guts to act on it. Which means you'd have to be 'willing to die for a principle', and I didn't see any evidence of it during the time of testing.
4 comments:
Hey, that's funny about reading the FT letter and not realizing it was by me. There were two major changes that FT made to that letter that bothered me. First, I didn't actually say about one particular federal arg. made by the parents that it "was correct" but merely something to the effect that it was worth consideration. Second, I mentioned Scalia's actual opinion in Cruzan, where he expressly challenged what have turned out to be its most important and enduring effects. That was cut, and then Miller tried to justify Cruzan on the grounds that Scalia had concurred in it.
Miller actually admitted in private conv. that I had caught him over one legal point: He expressly stated that the legal decision was Michael Schiavo's, whereas the courts repeatedly stated that it was not but rather was (in some bizarre sense) Terri's own wishes that the courts would enforce against _any_ guardian. Michael had merely, as it were, given a good hard kick (probably lying through his teeth) to start off the process to make sure she died. But once the decision came down the pike in 2000, was it?, that this was "her own wish," she was doomed even if he'd had a change of heart.
I had several RR blog posts on Terri's case, all much more cool and calm than I really felt about it. Here's one, along some of the same lines as the FT article:
http://rightreason.ektopos.com/archives/2005/03/aggressor_court.html
Here's a discussion with Miller, in which I press him on the question of whether Terri's death should have been regarded as state action:
http://rightreason.ektopos.com/archives/2005/12/post_2.html
I also had two, earlier, on the ridiculous evidence that was allowed to pass as "clear and convincing" in Terri's case. They're listed as "The Right to Live and the Right Reference Class" (parts I and II) in my posts at RR.
Miller is an odd case. In some ways he's very pro-life, but he seems to think Cruzan is just ducky because it merely codifies the idea that it's a tort to administer "treatment" against a person's wishes. He seems to want (this from private e-mail) the whole thing to be made more _fuzzy_ so that basically the guardian can decide what is in the person's best interests. This, I gather, is because he thinks that such decisions are so complex that the law shouldn't try to micro-manage them. He seems surprisingly ambivalent on the question of whether it's ever right to dehydrate a person to death over two weeks, though evidently the only situations where he'd consider it would be those where the whole rest of the family is going to be beggared and plausibly starve to death if you administer the ANH to one member, or something like that which will never come up.
But actually, he's a very nice guy.
Miller tried to justify Cruzan on the grounds that Scalia had concurred in it.
Scalia's concurrence is certainly no justification, but I'd still like to know why he did.
Miller actually admitted in private conv. that I had caught him over one legal point: that the legal decision was Michael Schiavo's, whereas the courts repeatedly stated that it was not...
But you had him dead to rights on that point in your letter. I think the manly and gracious thing for him to do would have been to admit it in his response. But no, he rationalizes it by comparison to a hypothetical that ignores the moral malfeasance behind it all.
He seems to want...the whole thing to be made more _fuzzy_ so that basically the guardian can decide what is in the person's best interests.
A red herring (on his part) because this is what normally happens anyway, as long as what is being contemplated is not murder. This is connected to "the patient's wishes" theme that kept cropping up and infuriating me no end, because conservatives kept moaning, "If only we'd known what she really wanted," as though a patient can leave behind a valid order to have herself murdered. Once the Florida courts decided that that's what she would have wanted, they demanded that it be done. It doesn't require micro-management, just the abolition of laws that make PVS patients candidates for extermination. And Miller was wrong that the judiciary was "just following the law." The Florida Supreme Court's final decision, declaring Terri's law unconstitutional, was a clear statement: we will not have our authority brooked by the people's passions or by any other branch of government.
He seems surprisingly ambivalent on the question of whether it's ever right to dehydrate a person to death over two weeks, though evidently the only situations where he'd consider it would be those where the whole rest of the family is going to be beggared...
How nicely consequentialist of him.
I'll take your word for it that he's a nice guy. I don't have much use for niceness. I know a lot of nice people who could have cared less about Terri Schiavo. The impression I get from reading his articles is of someone who mouths the right words without feeling them in his heart, of someone who puts the order of a process above justice for people. He could not admit publicly that you were right about something and he was wrong. To do that would have meant abandoning his admiration of the flawless display of 'due process' which was his reason for writing. He actually said in his original piece that nowhere along the line were Terri's civil rights violated. It's astounding that a "pro-life" legal mind could believe that.
I think I will post that letter I mentioned.
I'll read you RR stuff if you promise to follow the links to mine.
I read "Dead Woman Waking" (great title, and great post). I think the Christopher Reeves question is excellent. I'll follow the others one at a time. You don't have to read all of mine at all. I was just dropping a few more in because I thought you might like to know they were out there.
I entirely agree with you about the whole "what the patient wd. have wished" thing. But as a practical matter, it would save quite a few lives if people actually had to leave it in writing that they want to die by dehydration and had to be informed in rather clear detail as to what they are consenting to. That wouldn't make it right; it might deter people, though. Sort of like informed consent laws for abortion. And if "clear and convincing evidence" were kept to written evidence instead of all this _garbage_ where some murderous person can just say, "Oh, she made this comment while watching a TV show," and if the presumption were not to dehydrate a person to death absent a written request...well, Terri would be alive today.
It's not what should be, but it's a heck of a lot better than what they have in Florida now.
Nope, I'm going to read them all.
"Oh, she made this comment while watching a TV show."
Ain't it the truth? And a court acted on it. As evidence.
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