One of my readers has posted two long comments in response to my post (and Dr. Jeff Wilson's guest post) on Terry Shiavo. You can read the below in the comments section of "Saving Private Shiavo." Joe V. is a very old friend of mine. I've known him since the 2nd grade. During those early years he battled cancer (as he notes in his comment) and I was witness to the physical and psychological turmoil he suffered as a result. I have always considered myself his friend, though perhaps I was not always the best friend I could be. Joe and I lost touch sometime after college, though I get word of him from mutual friends on occassion. Joe was, last time I knew enough to judge, a conservative Republican and an admirer of Antonin Scalia's political and judicial views. This is of course his right.
His comments presume to poke wholes in my earlier argument about the Shiavo case and Bush's motives for pursuing it -- but they really do nothing of the sort. First of all, Joe never addresses the incontravertible evidence (the "talking points" for instance) that the Republican Party (which doesn't go to the bathroom without the approval or George Bush and Karl Rove) has seen this case in purely political terms from the beginning. Secondly, he doesn't address the fact that Bush's position has flip-flopped since the signing of his hospital-friendly bill in Texas. Thirdly, his sense of what's at stake in this case -- and of what the case "is" generally -- is just all wrong. Let me see if I can explain.
Joe states that his personal battle with terminal illness makes this case near and dear to him, and gives the impression that this makes his opinion authoritative. But in fact the opposite is true. When a case is "near and dear" to you a judge throws you off the jury, and with very good reason -- namely, because your ability to be impartial (and thus to provide the sort of peer judgement the Constitution envisions) is seriously in doubt. I feel very badly that Joe is still battling cancer, having suffered it again as recently as two years ago -- but if anything, this makes me trust his opinion of the Shiavo case less, not more. I respect him too much to patronize him by pretending this isn't the case.
By the same token, I myself am having to struggle to keep my personal experiences from affecting my opinion of this case. In the last three months, two people I love very much have died -- too soon -- from terminal illness. Both of them were able to make conscious decisions about how they wanted to die and both chose to die with grace and dignity and without prolonging the inevitable beyond the time they needed to convene with their loved ones. These too are experiences quite differenent from those in the Shiavo case. Unlike Joe's situation and those of my two family members Terry Shiavo CAN NOT make her own decision.
And that is the central fact. Terry Shiavo has a husband who -- no one really disputes -- she loved at the time she slipped into a vegetative state. What the courts have said, over and over, is that, barring strong evidence that it would be illegal, the decision to withdraw various forms of life support is HIS, the husband's. Not her parents or her siblings or her uncles or her friends. Her husband's. When someone you love is dying, you have innumerable conflicting emotions. Sometimes you don't want them to go even though you know that they are needlesly suffering and that THEY want to go. Sometimes people within the circles of loved ones disagree as to how to proceed. So the court invests SOMEONE with the authority to make that decision. Imagine the absolute chaos that would ensue if they didn't! And in this case it is the husband. Terry Shiavo's parents can believe whatever they want -- and we as citizens can sympathize with them or not. But they simply have no legal roll in deciding her fate. Period. As a spouse, I think this is quite right.
As far as the attempts to discredit Michael Shiavo as some sort of con man, I find them absolutely appauling and insulting . Five years after his wife slipped into a vegetative state he started dating another woman. We're supposed to take this as evidence that he didn't love her? C'mon! If God forbid, I slipped into a vegetative state I'd certainly want my wife to start a new life after five years. Hell, two or three years of mourning would be fine with me. And as for the malpractice money, it's gone folks. DOES ANYONE ACTUALLY THINK THAT THIS GUY, MICHAEL SHIAVO, WOULD HAVE WENT THROUGH THIS LEVEL OF TOTAL HELL, FIFTEEN YEARS FIGHTING HIS WIFE'S PARENTS, FOR THE FEW BUCKS THAT ARE LEFT? Puh-lease. The guy simply wants his wife to die peacefully after being kept needlessly alive, it seems to me. You can disagree with him but to pretend that this is not a plausible response from a loving husband is completely ridiculous. (As an aside, the fact that Nat Hentoff -- "a liberal" as Joe puts it -- sides with Shiavo's parents means nothing to me. Nat Hentoff is a fine jazz critic but I don't think he has anything especially enlightening to say about this case or politics generally.)
Lastly, Joe posits that my view of George Bush's role in this case is clouded by my hatred of Bush himself. Well, okay, I do hate Bush with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. But, sheesh!, do you really need to dislike Bush to recognize what a pathetic pandering job he's doing in this case? He is doing what IN ALMOST EVERY OTHER CASE he would not do: get involved in a private matter obviously under the jurisdiction of the state of Florida. Indeed, the only other case I can think of where he meddled with the Florida courts was...um...the 2000 election which made him president.
