hell has frozen over, I agree with Derbyshire?????

[Hamlette]

there are some comments in this review of The Party of Death by Ponnuru (you might have seen him on The Daily Show, Jon ate him alive with the collateral damage/deaths argument) that sets my teeth on edge but he completely trashes the Right to Life (RTL) movement calling it a frigid and pitiless dogma.

The kicker for him is the Schiavo case. And his bitch with Roe is not abortion but state's rights. (Derbyshire's, not Ponnuru.) It reminds me of how the Dixiecrats' hold on the Dem party couldn't survive the civil rights movement. The RTLers have gone too far (with Schiavo and stem cell research) for many conservatives. Oh please dear god, let it be OVER for them.

There might be a middle ground...with everyone but the Ponnuru's of the world.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=3190&sec_id=3190

"Can Right to Life (hereinafter RTL) fairly be called a cult?

. . .

Part Two (of the book) opens with a discussion of euthanasia, with several references to the Schiavo case. To Ponnuru’s credit, even he seems a little embarrassed by the freak show that surrounded Mrs. Schiavo’s last days, and he spares us most of the details (which are anyway thoroughly covered, from both sides, in at least five recent books). Not that his embarrassment prevents the author from engaging in a dense flurry of those rhetorical sleights of hand I noted earlier. He tells us, to take one example from many, that Michael Schiavo won a $1.1 million settlement in a negligence suit against his wife’s doctors, without also telling us that Mrs. Schiavo’s parents fought like cats to get their hands on their daughter’s estate; or that Mr. Schiavo offered (in writing, in documents deposited with officers of the court) to sign over that estate—which was anyway much diminished by legal bills—to a registered charity if his in-laws would withdraw their lawsuits; or for that matter that Mr. Schiavo was a well-paid working professional well able to support himself, while his in-laws were chronically broke, at least until the big RTL foundations showed up with checkbooks a-flapping. And of course Ponnuru does not mention the few seconds of misleading videotape, carefully selected from over four hours’ worth, released (in violation of a court order!) by the in-laws to the media, and endlessly replayed on sensationalist TV news programs.

In fact, Ponnuru has nothing to say at all about the monstrous character assassination, carried out by utterly unscrupulous RTL propagandists, of a decent man who coped humanely and well with a terrible life calamity. Well, not quite nothing: “It cannot be denied that pro-lifers were guilty of some excesses,” Ponnuru murmurs. Some excesses? I would say. Here the author sounds like nothing so much as a Soviet Communist Party apparatchik, circa 1960, offering a grudging admission that Stalin and his cronies might, just once or twice, have been a tad over-zealous in dealing with class enemies. Perhaps I should add here that after reading three (Schiavo, Schindler, and Eisenberg) of the above-mentioned five-or-so books, I came away more convinced than ever that Michael Schiavo is a good man criminally traduced by brutal, unprincipled RTL fanatics, from whose number, on the evidence of this chapter, Ponnuru cannot with certainty be excluded.

. . .

A corollary, though Ponnuru seems unaware of it, is that people who are obsessively interested in these topics seem, to the rest of us, a bit creepy. We may even find ourselves wondering which side, really, is the Party of Death.

. . .

Yet it remains the case that our Constitution does not permit the framing of laws based on the peculiar tenets of any religion or sect, and Party of Death is obviously inspired by religious belief. The philosophical passages strictly follow the Golden Rule of religious apologetics, which is: The conclusion is known in advance, and the task of the intellectual is to erect supporting arguments. It would be an astounding thing, just from a statistical point of view, if, after conducting a rigorous open-ended inquiry from philosophical first principles, our author came to conclusions precisely congruent with the dogmas of the church in which he himself is a communicant. Yet that is the case, very nearly, with Party of Death. Remarkable! What if, after all that intellectual work, all that propositional algebra, all those elegant syllogisms, the author had come to the conclusion that abortion was not such a bad thing after all? I suppose he would have been plunged into severe psychic distress. Fortunately there was never the slightest chance of this happening.