"No Lie Is Too Low For Them": What the Terri Schiavo Affair Can Teach Us About Today's Right-Wing

[imurhuckleberry]

"No Lie Is Too Low For Them": What the Terri Schiavo Affair Can Teach Us About Today's Right-Wing Zealots

March 31, 2010


March 31st marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Terri Schiavo. For that one month in 2005, the nation was transfixed, as the cable television news networks gathered en masse for a round-the-clock campout outside Terri's hospice, the public was sucked in by the portrayal of a defenseless victim about to have her feeding tubes pulled. The real story of a family's struggle with end of life decisions: Terri's husband Michael's efforts to facilitate her recovery since her collapse fifteen years earlier into a permanent vegetative state, the bitter estrangement of her husband and parents through this exhausting process, and the ultimate, wretching decision about what to do became the fodder of a fully-owned conservative enterprise who framed the events as "the struggle to keep Terri alive."

The media acted "like sharks attacking the wounded," Jon Eisenberg, an Oakland, California appellate lawyer who was one of Michael Schiavo's attorney's in the Terri Schiavo case, recently told AlterNet in an e-mail exchange. And the Religious Right acted out of "pure opportunism." It appeared, Eisenberg added, that they were concerned with much broader issues like attacking the fundamental constitutional right of control over your own body, known as "personal autonomy": "They cared not one whit about Terri Schiavo.

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http://www.alternet.org/rights/146252/%22no_lie_is_too_low_for_them%22%3A_what_the_terri_schiavo_affair_can_teach_us_about_today%27s_right-wing_zealots

[tonysam]

1. The big liars were the ones backing Michael Schiavo and his nutjob lawyer George Felos

Berkowitz is a liar. Here is a REAL discussion of the issue from the disability rights organization Not Dead Yet:

That bipartisan moment didn't last long. It actually started to unravel several days before this press conference. Senator Martinez inadvertently passed a memo to Senator Harkin that listed a list of "Republican talking points" that involved ways the Schiavo case could be used to attack Democrats. The memo was written by an aide to Senator Martinez, who professed ignorance over its contents at the time.

After Terri Schiavo died, several leaders of Conservative interest groups started using the unsuccessful court challenge as a political rallying cry:
___
As the vigil in Florida ended for Ms. Schiavo, who was severely brain-damaged, conservatives said the refusal of the federal courts to step in underscored the need for Senate Republicans to end the ability of the Democratic minority to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees.

Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, said the judges who would not stop the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube were ''guilty not only of judicial malfeasance -- but of the cold-blooded, cold-hearted extermination of an innocent human life.''

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, said: ''It is a tragic, unfortunate but avoidable event that should awaken Americans to the problem of the courts. It is no longer theoretical. It is life or death.''
___

Right-Wing interest groups and leaders weren't the only ones looking to further polarize the public - and revise history - in the name of political gamesmanship.

In mid-April 2005, DNC Chair Howard Dean announced that Democrats would make the Schiavo case an election issue:
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Dean, who has called congressional intervention in the Schiavo case "political grandstanding," singled out House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) for his leading role in the matter.

"This is going to be an issue in 2006, and it's going to be an issue in 2008," Dean told about 200 people at a gay rights group's breakfast in West Hollywood, "because we're going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, 'Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?' "

Dean, a practicing physician until he became governor of Vermont in 1991, added: "The issue is: Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest powers tell us what to do? Or are we going to be allowed to consult our own high powers when we make very difficult decisions?"

Before Schiavo's death, the Republican-controlled Congress passed legislation giving her parents the right to take action in federal court to have her feeding tube reinserted, but no judge intervened. Schiavo's husband had fought for years to withdraw the tube, arguing that she would not have wanted her life extended.

Although Democrats voted for the measure, Dean said it provided an opportunity to showcase what he called Republican intrusiveness in the lives of Americans.
___

This is far from a complete list of those who promoted a revisionist history of the Schiavo strruggle for their own political ends, but it's pretty representative.

On the right and the left, both bet on the same revision of history - that the battle over Terri Schiavo was a chapter in the "culture wars." In the end, it would seem that Howard Dean won the "bet" over who would be best served by that revision.

The real losers, of course, are people under guardianship or a conservatorship. The atmosephere at present is poisonous in terms of revisiting what kind of protections people whose decisionmaking is in the hands of others might need.

Stephen Drake

People who support the medical killing of the disabled, no matter how profound, are not liberals or progressives. Period.

Make sure to watch the C-SPAN video at the link. Tom Harkin was in the forefront of trying to give Terri Schiavo the right to a federal review of the case, just as death row inmates have that right.

I wish the so-called "left" would quit the deceit.

[northernlights]

2. Terry Schiavo was not disabled

She was brain dead. Her brain was seriously decomposed within 6 months of event that put her into a persistant vegetative state. By the time they pulled the tubes that kept her body "alive" her brain was liquid.

[Doctor_J]

3. Your excerpted text shows what slimy filth the Repukes are

Big, intrusive government, using a hsuband whose wife had been kept alive by machines for 15 years to "attack the Democrats", lying about their shameless political grandstanding.

I wish right wingers would not post here.

[WinkyDink]

4. Too bad TS would have been INCAPABLE OF KNOWING THERE WAS A REVIEW.

[moobu2]

5. Not Dead Yet was just using Terri Schiavo like the Right to Lifers were

and Republicans were - for political reasons. Terri had no functioning cerebral cortex thus, she could have never again been a conscious "person". She wasn't "disabled", she was a breathing corpse with no mind being force fed and kept alive. Terri Schiavo actually died in 1990.

You're the one spreading lies whether you know that or not.

[ThatPoetGuy]

6. That article is bullshit.

Stephen Drake's article, that is, not the one in the OP.

Howard Dean wanted to point out how far some politicians were willing to go. He wanted to point out that an entire political party had tried to invade the lives and homes of real people, people who were suffering, people who faced morally complicated, difficult decisions. An entire political party had tried to use religion as the basis to foist government control over these people's lives and bodies. Howard Dean wanted people to be aware of that. Anyone who would equate Dean's statements to James Dobson's vile false accusation of murder is someone who has lost even the most basic ability to discern truth from lies, right from wrong.

People who want to force others to suffer, indefinitely, because of a religious belief, are not good people. Period.