Do You Want Tom DeLay Making Your Family's Decisions?

Florida has a law and it's a pretty simple law -- individuals have the freedom to decide whether they want to live in a permanent vegetative state. A person can exercise this right by executing a living will. What happened in Terri Schiavo's case is that she ended up in a permanent vegetative state without having made a living will. So what happens in this case is that the Court appoints a guardian for Terri (because she can't make up her own mind or speak for herself) and the guardian decides whether Terri wanted to live in a permanent vegetative state.

Note: the guardian is not deciding whether he wants Terri to live or die, but what Terri's wishes would be if she could communicate, i.e., if she had made a living will before ending up in her unfortunate condition. This decision has to be approved by the Court, and in Terri's case, the Court held extensive hearings and heard testimony from people who had heard Terri make comments about not wanting to live that way. So after all these court proceedings the Judge decided that the guardian's decision was correct and that Terri Schiavo would have decided not to stay alive in a permanent vegetative state.

Pretty simple, eh?

Not only simple, but focused solely on trying to figure out what Terri Schiavo would want if she were able to communicate. Now isn't that the essence of personal freedom?

This simple fact gets lost because there is a contradiction of logic here: If Terri could communicate, she wouldn't be in a permanent vegetative state, so how can we talk about doing what Terri would want if she could communicate? In a sense this is true, but what we are really talking about is figuring out what choice Terri would have made before falling victim to her tragedy.

Maybe there is no decision more difficult than deciding that any further efforts to help a loved one would be futile. I can only imagine how soul wrenching it must be to decide to withhold treatment from a parent, a child or a spouse. It also strikes me as an intensely private decision, an act of conscience. In other words, it is exactly the kind of decision in which the government has no business getting involved.

What make the Schiavo case so public is that Terri's parents disagree with the decision of the Guardian (Terri's husband) and the Court, and they are doing everything in their power to have that decision overturned. I can understand the agony of Terri's parents. My heart goes out to them.

The highly unusual and dramatic circumstances of the Schiavo case have obscured the commonplace nature of the core of the dispute -- Terri's own wishes versus the wishes of her parents. The reason Terri's wishes trump those of her parents is because she is an adult, and in our society, an adult child has the personal freedom to make her own decisions about her own life. No matter how much anguish those decisions cause her parents.

I guess you could call this the collateral damage of our free society. When people are free to make decisions about their own lives, it is inevitable that some are going to make decisions that are highly unpopular or even extremely painful to their parents. Haven't we all known someone who has married against their parents' wishes, or who have chosen a career or religion that their parents object to? There are parents who disown or disinherit their children for exercising their rights to make such choices. Here, Terri's parents refuse to accept that she make the choice not to live under these circumstances, but that is exactly what all the trials and court hearings have decided.

We live according to the rule of law. One of those rules is that when there are disputes they are decided by courts. The decision of the courts is final, and any facts that have been decided by the courts must be accepted as true. It's just like the rule in baseball: if the umpire says you're out, you're out.

And just like in baseball, sometimes the call is very unpopular. The far right is doing something very scary and very dangerous. When courts make an unpopular ruling, they use that ruling as a pretext to weaken the power of the courts. In the Schiavo case, these far right politicians are attacking "activist" judges and Bush will be using the outcomeof the Schiavo case as an argument for why his types of judges need to be appointed. But we don't appoint judges because we want a particular result in a particular case. We appoint judges to follow the law, and that is exactly what the judges in the Schiavo case have done. You can't change the law by changing the judges. The real effort here is to weaken the courts, because the courts are the only branch of government that is going to protect you against the abuses of government that overreaches and infringes on your rights.

Let's go back to baseball for a second. When an umpire makes an unpopular call, we don't call for the elimination of umpires. In baseball, just as in politics, there is a home team and an away team. Even the fans of the home team understand the importance that umpires be independent. We know that if the umpires in Yankee stadium always make calls that favor the Yankees, we will have damaged the game of baseball. Even Yankee fans, or at least most of them, would understand this. Sure, maybe there will some short term benefits to the Yankees, but the long term effects would be devastating.

So it is with the courts. Right now, George Bush is trying to stack the federal courts with judges that he thinks will always rule in favor of his contingency -- corporate business interests and social reactionaries. The far right attempts to gain public support for this agenda by pointing to unpopular outcomes such as the Schiavo case, never mind that the Schiavo case is actually a triumph of all those values that the far right pretends to champion -- individual freedom, the right to live one's life without undue intrusion from the government, the sanctity of marriage and family, and state's rights. Here, on one small stage we see that these politicians don't believe in those principles at all, as they gladly shove those principles aside when they see the opportunity to capitalize on this poor woman's tragedy to pursue their real political agenda, which is the consolidation of their power and the weakening of the judicial branch, because the judicial branch acts as a restraint on that power.

What gets lost in all this is the brilliant way in which our court system works. Instinctively, the rank and file members of our society want an impartial and independent judicial system. But the rank and file can be easily mislead and manipulated. When people react negatively to the Schiavo decisions, it is far easier to convince them that the judges are heartless liberals who want to tear our society apart than to explain how in fact decisions such as these are actually the glue that holds are society together. Complex rational explanations just cannot compete against simple, emotional reactions. We saw that in the last election.

To be continued....

Read Part One