|
Refining my thesis on the liberals and Schiavo
(Note: This entry contains a list of VFR entries on the Schiavo case.) Some readers have praised my article at FrontPage Magazine about the liberals and Terri Schiavo, while disagreeing with my central point about the liberals’ motivation for seeking Terri’s death. Pace me, these readers think the liberals were primarily driven by a desire to advance the cause of euthanasia, not by a reactive opposition to conservatives. I’ll admit that my article may have dispensed too easily with the possibility that the liberals were seeking euthansia for its own sake. But how then do we reconcile the euthanasia explanation with my point that the liberals’ support for euthanasia seemed entirely contingent on Michael Schiavo’s decision to pursue euthanasia, whereas if he hadn’t pursued it, the liberals wouldn’t have even thought of it and wouldn’t have been disturbed by Michael’s decision to keep his wife alive? I would suggest this approach to the problem. The liberals have a hankering after euthanasia, but it’s not a fully explicit and consistent position. At the same time, the liberals make a cult of individual choice, yet that also is not a fully worked out position, as there’s no apparent reason why they should choose Michael’s choice for Terri’s death over the Schindlers’ choice for Terri’s life. Clearly there’s a conflict among different individual choices that is being resolved in one direction rather than the other. And the answer may be that when someone’s individual choice happens to be a choice for euthanasia, then that choice becomes the liberal position as well. Individual choice by itself is not enough. The belief in euthanasia by itself is not enough. But when, to paraphrase Yeats,
Choice being at one with Death at last,the two come together, then that becomes a liberal cause celebre. Again, if Michael Schiavo hadn’t sought his wife’s death, the liberals wouldn’t have wanted her dead either, or, in any case, they wouldn’t have cared about the situation and wouldn�t have been bothered by her continued existence attached to a feeding tube. But once Michael did seek Terri’s death, the liberals’ tropism toward euthanasia kicked in. If we add on top of this the liberals’ reactive opposition to conservative and Christian “theocrats,” which in turn is motivated by the fact, unbearable to liberals, that America is in a prolonged war with genuine forces of evil (as discussed in my article), then we may have something approaching a workable theory of liberal motivations in the Schiavo case.
VFR’s articles on Terri Schiavo, in chronological sequence:
Yet another Holy Week atrocity Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 01, 2005 04:30 PM | Send Email entry |