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Trying to decipher the liberal position on Terri
What are we to make of the liberals who think that Terri Schiavo, motionless and attached to a feeding tube for the last 15 years, ought to be disconnected from the tube and allowed to die, and that conservatives are theocratic dictators interfering in a private matter, namely the right of Terri’s legal guardian, her husband Michael, to make the determination to let her die? The problem with the liberal position is that if Michael had wanted Terri to go on living on the feeding tube, or if Michael had handed over legal guardianship to Terri’s parents and they wanted her to go on living on the feeding tube, the liberals would presumably have had no problem with that. So the ostensible liberal position is not that Terri simply ought to die. The ostensible liberal position is that private personal choice—Michael’s private personal choice—ought to prevail. And this is where the situation gets tricky. Considering the fact that Terri’s parents and siblings very much want her to live despite Michael’s efforts to have her die, and considering the fact that Terri’s relatives are convinced that Terri has consciousness and is not in a vegetative state, and considering the fact that Michael has a common law wife of many years and two children with her, and so logically ought to divorce Terri and marry the mother of his children and return the guardianship to Terri’s parents who are much more involved with Terri’s care and want her to live, the exclusive private right of Michael to decide on her life and death ceases to seem so sacred and becomes questionable at the least. Again, if Michael had not wanted Terri to die, liberals wouldn’t be thinking twice about this case, notwithstanding their expressions of horror at the idea of a person living her whole life on a feeding tube; they wouldn’t be calling conservatives pro-life fanatics for insisting that a person go on living in such a condition, since the liberals themselves would be consenting to Terri’s living in that condition. And if the judge had not found (as evidence indicates) that Terri is not in a vegetative state but has a degree of consciousness and responsiveness, and so had not ruled that her tube could be disconnected, the liberals wouldn’t be thinking twice about the case. And if the judge had not found (on the basis of questionable evidence) that Terri had once expressed a desire to die if she were permanently disabled, the liberals wouldn’t be thinking twice about the case. Thus the whole liberal position rests on three extrinsic facts or questionable factual findings, which could just as easily have gone the other way. Why then the passionate liberal conviction that Terri must die? There is something mysterious at the heart of the liberal position on this issue. Jim Kalb shares my bemusement. Up until 9/11, he tells me, he could more or less understand the liberals’ positions on a variety of social issues, even though he didn’t share them. Their views had a logic, as twisted as it may have been. But the liberals’ take on Terri Schiavo makes no sense to him at all. For example, why must the personal preference of Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband who has (understandably) moved on with his life, be seen as sacred and inviolable, but the personal preference of Terri’s parents, who have not moved on with their lives but want to care for their daughter, be equated with “theocratic” tyranny that must be resisted at all costs? It can’t be explained in terms of any recognizable liberal perspective. Therefore it can only be explained as stemming from sheer liberal reactiveness: conservatives support the Schindlers, so liberals must fight them. As a reader wrote in an e-mail earlier today, a former history professor of his recently said to him (and these were the professor’s exact words), “Anything Tom DeLay and those conservatives are for, I’m against.” As Mr. Kalb also points out, this reactiveness may be simply a further expression of the deep irrationalism that has taken over left-liberals since 9/11. Prior to 9/11, many liberals would have taken the Schindler’s side, as representing the rights of an oppressed and helpless individual. After 9/11, they do not. What is it about 9/11 that has had this effect on liberals? I would suggest that the post-9/11 world has placed liberals under an unbearable pressure. The Islamist attack on our country propelled us into a conflict with a mortal enemy. But liberals can’t stand the idea of our having an enemy, let alone a mortal enemy, a “them,” whose very existence justifies our aggression. Such an enemy must therefore be seen as a product of “root causes” generated by us. Further, in keeping with the inverted moral order of liberalism, the more threatening such an enemy really is, the more vile must be the root causes within ourselves that are creating that enemy. The more evil our enemy, the more judgmental, greedy, cynical, dishonest, uncompassionate, racist, and imperialistic we are for fighting him. If our enemy seeks a theocratic dictatorship over the whole world (which is the actual case), we must be seen as seeking a theocratic dictatorship over the whole world, even though there has never been anything remotely like a theocratic dictatorship in our entire history.
Thus the liberals’ helpless rage, both against the war on Islamic theocracy and against the (so-called) conservatism that has become dominant in American politics as a result of that war, takes the form of a floating indictment of conservatives as the real theocrats. This attitude is then projected onto any issue between conservatives and liberals that may arise, such as the battle over the fate of Terri Schiavo: Terri’s right to live is supported by conservatives; conservatives are theocrats; therefore Terri is a symbol of theocracy, and therefore liberals want her to die. Email entry |