Terri
Schiavo and the Religious Right
(March 25, 2005)
Terri Schiavo is brain-dead as far as her consciousness and
self-awareness are concerned; on this medical doctors are agreed. She
has no hope of recovering her consciousness or returning to any sort of
life. She has been in a vegetative state, relying on artificial
means of sustenance, for fifteen years. However, certain very limited
motor functionings persist, as we can see on stock footage news
reports. Her eyes open and blink; her face conveys a certain
expression. Perhaps other movements of the body occur.
But they are automatic, there is no conscious life, no awareness behind
them.
These automatic motor functions give something
to Terri Schiavo's parents, the illusion that she is not entirely gone
from them. It may also give them a faint hope that someday she will
'awaken' from her comatose state, even though medical opinion holds out
not the slightest hope for it. The agony of Terri's parents at losing
their daughter is, of course, real and a tragedy. They are deserving of
our sympathies. But is society thereby obligated to devote all possible
resources to keeping her body alive indefinitely, to the exclusion of
all other
considerations?
Suppose medical science had the capacity (and
it may well have in the foreseeable future) to produce or 'keep alive'
certain bodily motor functions—I don't
mean by feeding but by directly
stimulating the brain or body to create them. Could Terri Schiavo's
parents demand that these measures be taken to make her body function
to some degree so as to give her a semblance of life
and provide them with a puppet-daughter? Which is essentially all she
is at the moment.
What has been particularly
appalling is the weighing in of the religious voice in support of
keeping Terri Schiavo's body alive no matter what. Such support is
coming virtually entirely from this constituency. Its rhetoric has been
extreme even for them, such as likening the removal of the feeding tube
to Terri's own "crucifixion." They talk of her—and her
rights—as
though there is a living person inside that shell, and they ignore her
declared wishes about not being kept alive under such conditions. I am
not the only one to express the idea that this is entirely
hypocritical, that the religious right has seized on this case for
political reasons, in order to promote itself and to make noise. As
in the debate over abortion, the religious mind needs an enemy, a
polemical
issue over which it can range itself 'on the side of the angels.' There
has been much talk
about God and morality. Even here there is hypocrisy. Why is all this
energy and the combined voice of evangelical America not raised instead
to God himself, a collective prayer for some kind of
alleviation of Terri's condition, perhaps even for her emergence from
her 15-year coma—some
signal that their God actually gives a damn? For all
their bows toward heaven, the religious right shows very little
confidence in the Deity being able or willing to do something loving
and merciful. Certainly, miracles are out of the question.
As for George W. Bush and the members of
Congress, they
have behaved with all the self-righteous fervor and emotionalism of a
revivalist gathering. If this is statesmanship, then Jimmy Swaggart
could be the
next President. Politics is ideally about steering a moderate middle
course,
about making rational choices, but there was no rationality in evidence
in Congress. But then, there is precious little of that on the American
public
scene at all these days.
This situation has been faced before. In both 2001 and 2003, Terri's
feeding tube was removed, and the religious right forced its
reinsertion. Was anything thereby accomplished? Is she any closer to a
miracle? Is it simply a case of bare life for bare life's sake, no
matter what its condition? The life that has been prolonged, that
others
have condemned her to, is hardly a dignified one. And they have ensured
that her death will not be, either, expressly ignoring her own
wishes. None of these things matter in the face of religious
conviction. We are treated all over the nation to parades of frenzied
believers bearing biblical
placards and statues. Are the saints in heaven, too, in support of the
bizarre
travesty Terri's 'life' has become?
The religious right seeks to impose its faith,
its moral standards, on society as a whole. But their own lives are no
more a reflection of that morality than those of non-fundamentalist
Christians or of atheists. Surveys show they are often worse. Their
mindless fanaticism has few limits, and appeals to rationality and
other
points of view fall on deaf ears. Now they have the government
aligned with them, cooperating to impose those views and shout down
dissenting
rights. Fortunately, the appeals courts have so far seen their way to
making more sober-minded
decisions. Facing the prospect of failure, the evangelicals have
approached Governor Jeb
Bush of Florida. When he pointed out that he could not act in
contravention of the
Constitution, one commentator summed it up: Governor Bush was being
urged to
ignore the law of the land and impose the law of God. Frightening.
Is it the law of God that Terri Schiavo
continue in this state for another 15 years? Another 50? Terri's death
at long last would not be a crucifixion. Rather, on this Good Friday,
she is crucified to her hospital bed. Instead of with nails, it's with
her feeding tube. Only there is to be no resurrection after three days.
They would have her stretched on her cross until her body died of old
age. Where does the religious mind think her spirit or soul would be
hanging
out during all that time? If she is truly "alive" then she has not yet
gone to heaven. Is her purgatory to be prolonged as long as possible?
Is Terri's husband never to have closure, never to get on with his own
life? Nor Terri's parents, tied to the shell of a daughter who will
never give them what they hopelessly crave?
If all this is "the law of God," it's time we
changed the laws. Maybe it's time to change Gods.
Earl Doherty
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