Posted on 04/01/2005 4:59:24 AM PST by Tailgunner Joe
poor article.
Many liberals supported Schiavo's right to life because they remember the Nazi T4 program...it's a civil rights issue...especially for Jews who remember history.
And maybe Jesse Jackson remembers history too, like the Tuskeegee experiment.
I like the mention of the post 9-11 mentality here.
Speaking of that I wonder how long before the conspirazoids start believing that this whole thing was a clandestine orchestration by the right (Rove et al) to rally the base.
Soon to be Michael Moore movie: The Terri Affair and the End of Privacy.
Why was only one man, Judge Greer, the determinant of the facts in Terri's case?
In most other cases, it is a jury that determines the facts. Certainly the facts in all capital cases are determined by a jury.
Qualified individuals can make wise judgments. An individual can also make horrific judgments. Our society has determined that groups of individuals are more likely to be wise. That is why we have city councils, company boards of directors, and jury trials. Groups of people tend to be "less imperfect" than single individuals.
Setting aside personalities, as distasteful as they appear to be, having only one person determine the facts seems to be the central failing of the judicial system in Terri's case. For the future, that failing could be solved by legislative action.
Because that's how probate court works. If you want juries in probate courts, you'll have to increase jury call-ups appropriately.
Actually, I'm waiting for the religious right to start hatching conspiracy theories about how they were set up for a fall by Rove.
Glad you decided to stay around and tweak the crazies.
Liberals view people as resource users and destroyers of the earth. Too many people, too few resources. Killing off the unwanted thru abortions and what they view as useless thru euthanasia saves valuable resources. That is the humanist socialist mindset.
The opus comes this afternoon/evening. It's going to be one hell of a show, I tell you.
It's an interesting article but I disagree that it was 9/11 that pushed libs over the edge. Who can forget the Elian horror under Clinton & Reno in which libs demonized the drowned,dead mother and Florida family and cheered when stormtroopers dragged an hysterical child out of a closet.
Anything those wild-eyed ignorant slackjawed RELIGIOUS PEOPLE *shudder* are for, you and your self-appointed band of all-wise philosopher kings are against.
The SOURCE of liberal support for Terri's death is simply this reason: Liberals have aligned themselves in a marriage-of-convenience with the concept of "Legal Positivism".
Said simply, legal positivism is a perspective that accepts the law 'as law' because it's the law, rather than because the law is 'right' because it flows from natural law.
A legal positivist will never say, as a Dickens' character said, that "sometimes the law is an a*s". A legal positivist begins any legal analysis with a predefined belief that the law IS morality, and reasons from the pre-ordained morality of the law -- WHATEVER that morality is.
One can see, immediately, that this hardly seems like a "liberal" position in any classical sense.
But the liberals have taken that position because the Supreme Court has granted rights that the left will not relinquish, including most importantly abortion on demand, and increasingly, homosexual rights.
To embrace legal positivism is to, in effect, close the door on further debate as to whether, on natural law principles, abortion should be regulated or banned. The liberal legal positivist understands that the Supreme Court has become a one-way ratchet to enshrine leftist principles in American life that, under a majoritarian process, would never see the light of day.
Terri died to uphold that principle.
That's all he has ever done here. He is a liberal trolling for right wing "crazies." Nothing pleases him more than to smear FReepers as psychotic racist criminals.
He is an equal opportunity smearer.
Actually, I'm not, and the article doesn't describe me.
I opposed removing Terri's feeding tube.
The problem is that Florida law allows for this result. In other words, if a judge applies the law as the legislature wrote it (which is, the last time I checked, the conservative view of the judiciary's role in government), results like this can happen.
The conservative solution, as I understand it, would be for the law to be repealed and/or amended in order to prevent such a result.
I can tell you what really killed Terri Schiavo: the Schindlers' witnesses repeatedly perjuring themselves. Judges have this funny habit of not believing you after being lied to repeatedly.
The solution attempted in Congress required a competent and honest lawyer to implement it. IMNHO, Gibbs was neither.
And with the farcical end to this debacle, the religious right is in a very ugly position: they didn't get the result they wanted, but there was one hell of an effort to accomplish that result. The GOP has an expectation that intense efforts on behalf of one specific element of their constituency will generate a similarly intense voter turnout in 2006 by those constituents.
However, a great many in the religious right are making noises about not supporting the GOP in 2006. God be with y'all if that comes to pass, because the GOP sure as hell won't.
I never do that. I leave that to the psychotic racist criminals themselves.
BTW, be advised: FR is now on several state law enforcement agency's watch lists thanks to some of the more idiotic statements made during this fiasco.
If you agree with LOC1's point, please visit and contribute to a vanity thread I posted which includes draft legislation to require the consent of an impartial jury to any court action which would result in a death, and forbids application to persons not found guilty of crimes of treatment which would be judge cruel and unusual punishment for a capital crime:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1375230/posts
I would really like some FReepers with legal background to tighten up the language and fill in the gaps, and then for us to send the draft legislation to our senators and congressmen.
Our local hospital (I suspect all hospitals) has a review board when the question to discontinue support arises. I haven't heard anything like this happening in this case, but, certainly, it is a decision that should not be left in the hands of one man, in any situation. I can not for the life of me figure out how a judge could not order more modern tests to be run or why he would not listen to newer evidence. The judicial system let Terri day from day 1.
That's not viable. No perjury was even alleged, by anyone, so far as I know. Certainly nobody was charged with or convicted of perjury. Greer could have brought the charge himself but for one problem -- he didn't have any evidentiary reason to doubt the depositions. You can call them perjurers all you wish, but that's defamation unless you can prove it. I don't think you can.
Good post.
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