http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2005/03/in-terry-schiavo-case-republicans.html
Employing extraordinary parliamentary procedures never before used for such a purpose, radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress have passed, in the dead of night, a bill which overrules the scientific, legal, and medical determinations of countless licensed physicians, state and federal judges (including the U.S. Supreme Court) and a small army of civilian witnesses in order to keep alive a Florida woman who has been in a persistent vegetative state--that is, scientifically brain-dead--for more than fifteen years.
To understand the Terry Schiavo case, you must first understand that not a single Congressman who spoke on Schiavo's "behalf" on Sunday night gives one whit about the Florida woman or her family.
People die under more tragic and contested circumstances every minute in the United States, and their unspoken and unheeded causes--universal healthcare, an end to homelessness, federally-mandated heating for the elderly, more money for Medicaid, more money for Medicare, better prenatal care for the poor, greater federal investment in disease prevention and research--get not a single moment of airtime in the halls of Congress or on our living room television sets.
No words or tears are spilled for them, or for their deaths.
No woman has ever received more due process in the American legal system, or had more engines of power directed toward the investigation and rectifying of any wrongs ever committed against her, or had greater scrutiny of the moral, medical, ethical, and scientific determinations made on her behalf and in her name over the past fifteen years, than Terry Schiavo.
Do not weep for Terry.
Weep for a country in which the business of government is meddling in the life and times of a single brain-dead woman from Florida, rather than securing a better future for the almost three hundred million of us without such a built-in voting bloc--such unprecedented access to power-brokers and primetime darlings--as Schiavo has had these fifteen years.
Jeb Bush wrote a law purely to "save" her (or his political career, no one was certain); members of Congress issued bogus, disingenuous subpoenas for her appearance before ad hoc sub-committee sessions as part of a massive, abusive-of-government stratagem to "save" her; and extraordinary remedies were sought in the legal system, even appeals to as august and nationally-minded a body as the U.S. Supreme Court, all in an effort to "save" this woman no more important, no more special, no more sacred than any of the rest of us--and make no mistake, many of the rest of us are suffering deeply, for a thousand different reasons this night--despite the fact that were Terry Schiavo able to speak (or to feel, or to think, or to dream) she undoubtedly would tell the whole ingratiating lot of aforementioned Republican meddlers to mind their own fucking business.
