Timothy Sandefur sent me a link to this essay by Cathy Young about the appalling rhetoric being thrown around in the Terri Schiavo case. She writes:
No doubt, some people trying to keep Schiavo, or her body, alive are driven by sincere humanitarian passion. But, mostly, this spectacle has been a sickening display of cynicism and fanaticism.
Hard to argue with that. It's an excellent essay, well worth reading.
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One of the reasons that I stopped paying attention to Cathy Young is the following excerpt from the linked-to column
Is there hypocrisy on both sides? Sure. Some on the left might well be championing Schiavo's survival as a disability rights or women's rights cause if it weren't being championed by right-to-life conservatives.
The problem with her column, like those on many columns I've read from right-wingers--and, make no mistake about it, although she purports to be a libertarian, she is a right-wing supporter--is that they often raise these speculative issues in such a manner as to bash liberal/leftists. Sorry, that's a fraud. Where is the evidence that people on the "left" are not championing Schiavo's "survival" because it is being championed by "right-to-life" conservatives? In the absence of that evidence, where is the hypocrisy? Cathy Young is just another idiot.
Still i wonder, now that the Pope has had a feeding tube inserted into him, what body of authority makes the final determinations about his receding into PVS and where in all of this will the right to live become the issue?????
The other question i have regards the effort being put into this pseudo-crisis as the UN(a now much maligned body by the very same people) issues the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment--that clearly shows how horribly detrimental our lifestyles have been on the planet. Can we calculate the costs of all media hype and court cases and grandstanding in this Schiavo case, in terms of how many people that money could provide access to living actual lives?