Month: April 2005

Stuart Buck attempts to re-frame the Schiavo question as one of competing principles:

One of the odd things about the Schiavo affair is the argument that “if you care about federalism, you wouldn’t favor Congress’s involvement in granting federal jurisdiction for Schiavo’s parents to have one more day in federal court.”

One sees this argument in many contexts: “If you really opposed abortion, you’d support the death penalty for women who have abortions,” or “if you really wanted to clean up the environment, you’d agree to ban all automobiles,” or “if you really supported bringing democracy to Iraq, you’d support war in about 100 other countries,” or “if you really supported free speech, you wouldn’t be in favor of hate crimes laws.” In short, “If you really believed in Principle X, you’d follow that principle to all extremes without ever letting another principle override it.”

But that sort of reasoning is often wrong. People often accuse their opponents of being hypocrites when, in fact, they may simply have been balancing competing principles. We all do this constantly. And the mere fact that someone reaches a different balance than you, or that they decline to treat one principle alone as being absolute, does not prove that they are being hypocritical.

He’s wrong, of course. This case was about three things that have nothing to do with federalism:

1) Do we consider a person dead when their brain has stopped, even if their heart still beats? and:

2) Do we consider it proper for legislative bodies (state or federal doesn’t matter) to attempt to make factual determinations in individual cases and craft bills that usurp judicial prerogatives; and:

3) Do we want to litigate each end-of-life situation where a family member way wish an irrational course of action all the way to the highest court in the jurisdiction?

Certainly, Congress was wrong to get involved in this case on federalism grounds, but that’s the least of their errors.

I don’t often agree with James Wolcott, or even find him tolerable. But he’s right about Scarborough:

Joe Scarborough is just a symptom, a noisy, ignorant, pimply symptom to be sure, but still. The real malefactors are the men in executive suits and suites who put such a bozo on the air and allow him to plant his shoes on the dying body of Terri Schiavo and use her as a political soapbox and religious pulpit. It’s conservatives who are dehydrating her, draining every last drop of dignity from her death.

Check this video clip of Hitchens telling Joe where to get off.

According to LaShawn Barber, this piece of crap linking the death of Terri Schiavo to godless Darwinism is a must-read:

Next, I have titled this short entry “Charles Darwin Killed Terri Schiavo” simply to make one point: when culture as a whole embraces the idea that man is merely an animal, the random result of the chance toss of the cosmic die, a purposeless biological accident without any meaningful superiority to an ape, a dog, or a microbe, no firm basis can be provided for a culture of compassion and life. The natural realm is a savage place, and there is no reason, within an evolutionary framework, to seek such things as compassion, tenderness, or mercy. We are seeing, especially in European culture, but more and more in the United States as well, the long-term impact of a belief in not the theory of evolution, but the religion of evolution. The impact of religious naturalistic materialism is tremendously clear as we see the judiciary abandoning the rule of law (especially as law reflects God’s creatorship and sovereignty) and issuing edicts that treat man as a mere animal, or worse (in the case of Terri Schiavo).

It was because of an intution that this sort of thing was coming that I asked tubers a week ago whether they were creationists.

With Pope John Paul II nearing death, I’ll once more demonstrate the maxim that you don’t need to know anything to have an opinion. He was apparently one of the better Popes, having helped make the world a better place by organizing the Solidarity Movement in Poland and pressuring the Soviet Union to reform.

His legacy was tarnished by the church’s coverup of the massive child sexual abuse ring operating in America inside the church, and by his opposition to the liberation of Iraq.

On issues of culture and morals, he took the right side of the evolution vs. creationism debate, and the wrong side in the gruesome Schiavo spectacle. Other bloggers have pointed out, BTW, that the church didn’t resort to heroic measures to prolong his suffering. There’s a lesson in that for sure.

I doubt that his successor will be as good, but one thing he needs to do quite promptly is kick Fr. Frank Pavone, the Schindler family goon who’s called Michael Schiavo and Judge Greer “murderers”, out of the church. Excommunicating Gerry Adams would also be a good move. Their idiotic opposition to birth control also has to go.

If the Catholic Church is to have a future in America, it has to stand for morality and decency and strongly against the exploitation of weak minds through anti-scientific teachings and the manipulation of emotion. Given that the Catholics operate some good schools, I’d like to see them make their reforms and stick around for a while.

Christopher Hitchens places rather more emphasis on John Paul II’s failings:

No obituary about John Paul II, for example, will omit to mention that he exerted enormous force to change the politics of Poland. Well, good for him, I would say. (He behaved much better on that occasion than he did when welcoming Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein’s most blood-spattered henchmen, to an audience at the Vatican and then for a private visit to Assisi.) But let nobody confuse the undermining of a Stalinist bureaucracy in a majority Catholic nation with the insidious attempt to thwart or bend the law in a secular democracy. And let nobody say that this is no problem.

That last sentence would be a reference to the pedophile coverup, about which he mentions a bit of irony:

A church that has allowed no latitude in its teachings on masturbation, premarital sex, birth control, and divorce suddenly asks for understanding and “wiggle room” for the most revolting crime on the books.

This is a mixed legacy, at best. Dean Esmay entertains the question of whether JP II was evil, and concludes he wasn’t in a definitive example of damning by faint praise.

It appears that most of JP II’s good works in Poland were done before he became Pope, and the bad deeds afterwards, so there’s an argument to made that the institution itself corrupted him. I suppose that’s the point.

While I’m not actually a religious person myself — I don’t even go to church on Easter — I’ve always been curious about religion and even spent very many years in the orbit of an Indian guru (wasted years) and in recent years I’ve tended to defend religious people in America from their hard-edged critics on the grounds that they contributed in a positive way to our public policy dialog.

My tendency now is not to do this anymore. I’ve been extremely disappointed by the willingness of our religious friends to toss out the Constitution and its Federalist principles to achieve (what they think) is a single good result. That’s so incredibly stupid that I can’t stomach it or anyone who holds to such thinking. So the religious fanatics are on their own.