Monday, April 04, 2005

So, Anything happen over the break?

I pretty much absented myself from the Terry Schiavo hullabaloo, because I felt the matter better presented in other formats. John Leo aptly sums up what went on in case you just turned over the rock.

One thing I did notice about the a particular argument that people who were opposed to keeping Schiavo alive kept using. "The religious right is out of control," or some facsimile thereof, they'd say.

"Out of control."

Look, I can see getting annoyed at involving the federal government in a matter this private. And reasonable people will disagree as to the proper point to allow nature to take its course. But to say that the religious right is "out of control" for wanting to save Schiavo's life, such as it was, says a lot more about you than it says about religious conservatives.

We aren't talking about organizing a crusade or setting Jews on fire. We're talking about attempting to re-insert a feeding tube into a disabled woman. Maybe doing so is superfluous, maybe it's not even what Terry Schiavo would have wanted. But if you can't see and understand what motivated the right-to-life crowd, then you might consider if you argued for Schiavo's death for the reasons you thought you did. And if the only reason you wanted to see her die was because it would annoy Pat Robertson, then you are the bigger asshole.

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