The precipitous evil that has been forced upon us by the newest demons of the culture of death, the euthanasia lobby, is a textbook case of death and destruction. Any assessment of what we have experienced in watching Terri Schiavo die must necessarily be an inventory of what we have lost in this battle—and I don’t just mean Terri. Losing her was painful enough, but we have lost much more in terms of our self-respect as a people and the sanctity of our institutions, and the wake of this destruction is not pretty. In fact, it looks much like a scorched earth.

The following is my honest assessment of what the euthanasia advocates had to kill in our culture in order to kill Terri. It is just a partial list of sacred obligations that a society owes to its citizens, especially its most vulnerable members, but I believe that it is an essential list of the priorities of every healthy society. It would rather be better to say that these obligations and institutions have been crippled rather than killed, but if they are not dead yet, they are severely threatened with extinction unless there is a general awakening of consciences.

First, let’s start with marriage. Michael Schiavo’s fraudulent “common law marriage” was spun by all the pundits as something that we all just had to accept. Are we really supposed to sit down and take that nonsense? First of all, Florida does not have a common law marriage statute, but if it did, Michael would be guilty of bigamy. I know quite a few self-respecting Christians who for once were wishing that we had a common-law marriage statute on the books so that they could have thrown the book at Michael. But if that was not bad enough, his adamant refusal to divorce that poor woman added insult to injury because it was the condition for him to maintain his fanatical control over her. In reality, the model of marriage that Michael gave the world was the antithesis of what actual marriage should be about. He redefined marriage as a covenant of hatred and made it a structure of unconditional domination. Whatever happened to fidelity “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health,” etc.? He got the “unto death” part right. And I don’t even need to get into the issue of whether he physically abused her or not to make my basic point: marriage got trashed. This is not the image of American culture that we want to project to the rest of the world.

What about parental rights? The very concept was shattered. “Agony” is the only noun that can accurately describe what the Schindlers have been put through for the past seven years of legal torture. What parent in America could possibly have watched that spectacle and not suffered for them? It was parental love denied expression by an atheistic court system. Why did we not see even the remotest sense of human compassion for suffering parents who had all the love in the world to offer their daughter and had it slapped down time and time again up to and including four pleas to the highest court of our nation? In a court system so obsessed with individual rights, Terri’s case shows that parental rights don’t matter. As an ironic twist of fate—or of Providence—would have it, in the same week that Terri was starved to death, that supreme fools’ court refused to recognize the rights of parents to be notified when their minor daughters go for abortions in the State of Idaho. Our courts and our culture have killed parental rights, and it’s high time that parents took note. Bob and Mary Schindler are icons of desperate parents bereft of all rights. And if I hear or read one more person calling the Schindlers “selfish” for wanting to save their daughter’s life and dignity, I think I will just scream.

Church teachings are no longer sacrosanct either as judicial activism has made clear. The only sacred doctrine in this judicial side show was apparently the infallible dictates of a renegade judge; he has been raised to a level of deity by the State, the Federal and the Supreme courts of the United States of America. No order for a de novo review of the facts by the highest legislative body in our land could reach the level of authority of George Greer’s opinion. All the black-robed high priests in their sanctuaries sitting atop their lofty thrones gave obeisance and bowed low to this idol, and they will not be deprived of their rightful worship. The fact that Terri’s own Church teaches the absolute sanctity of human life and the inadmissibility of removing food and water mattered little. Traditional dogma has been replaced by the will to power, and a new priesthood of the elite powering their subjective opinions on the handicapped is the reality that all institutions of our society now have to contend with. Those “inalienable rights” by which all citizens are “endowed by their Creator” are no more. The only absolute here is what Michael and the two Georges want.

Finally, truth itself got utterly rejected. While, thankfully, Terri did have her defenders in the public forum, the army of false prophets playing the circuit of talk shows and news programs did the dirty work of killing any basic dignity that Terri had left. The redefinition of her condition as a “persistent vegetative state” was atrocious and derived from one of the first legal battles where a doctor with ties to the Hemlock Society permanently dehumanized her. Now all people who are in that “state” are marked for more judicial-style killings. One despicable “doctor” on a CNN news program actually called Terri a “corpse” on national television and said that she had “less brain activity than animals” and of course then had no reason to remain as an expensive burden on her poor husband. Now we know why and how the Nazi holocaust could have killed 13 million people in such a short time: once the prophets of death killed the truth, it became open season on those whose only defense was the basic truth of their human dignity. The spirit of Dr. Mengele and Heinrich Himmler lives in modern day America.

Other fundamental rights and sacred institutions are victims of Terri’s travesty. Any person with a shred of decency will understand the implications of where this list from hell leaves us. The right to life—killed. Handicapped rights—crippled. The Hippocratic Oath’s provision to “do no harm”—beaten to death. The “justice” system—perverted. Our faith in the executive and legislative branches of government—severely undermined. Religion—mocked. The medical profession and hospice care—compromised. Public opinion—confused on all counts.

The scorched earth policy of Michael and the two Georges has potential to do permanent grave damage to our society, and our response to this travesty from here on out will determine what course America’s future takes. Will we choose life or death as a way of being Americans? Will we persevere in the dreadful mistakes of our renegade judges or will we act with principled conviction to overturn and forestall more institutionalized evil? We did it before in our history—slavery, civil rights—and we can do it again, but it will take a moral clarity and a force of will that is rare in American society nowadays. During the whole Schiavo affair there was precious little clarity about one basic matter that trumped the rest: we can never deny an innocent person the right to life for any reason whatsoever. Likewise, if an unjust judge, law or force intervenes in society to threaten the lives of innocent people, it must be objected to and at times deliberately disobeyed.

The Schiavo scorched earth strategy has left one dead and many sacred institutions wounded, and it will be up to people of conscience to decide where we go from here, and it is clear that America must make a choice. We will either decide as a nation that the gods of Michael and the two Georges are our gods or we will reject those gods in favor of the truth of our Founding Fathers’ vision of a society that exists for the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

 

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