Dismal age of martyrs

Hertzberg nails it again.

Meanwhile, the language of the debate over her fate, pitting a “right to die” against a “right to life,” turned rancid in its abstraction. Terri Schiavo, the person, had no further use for a right to die, because Terri Schiavo, the person, had long since exercised that right. Did it really matter if she had told her husband, when she was young and healthy, that she would not wish to live “that way”? Her body notwithstanding, she was not living “that way,” or any other way. By the same token, she had no use for a right to life, because her ability to benefit from such a right had long ago been rendered as moot as the legal pleadings on her alleged behalf would soon become.

As the week progressed, it was harder and harder to deny that the fervor of Terri’s Christianist “supporters” was motivated by dogmas unrelated to her or her rights. If she truly had a “right to life,” if removing her feeding tube was truly tantamount to murder, then neither the disapproval nor the approval of her family (or anyone else) could make the slightest moral difference. If her parents had agreed with her husband that the tube should be removed, would their acquiescence have somehow transubstantiated murder into mercy? And, with or without their acquiescence, if Michael Schiavo had spent the last ten years adhering strictly to the orthodox code of family values—if he had remained faithfully celibate, if he had not taken a mistress and had children with her—then might not some of those now accusing him of murder be demanding that his Biblically ordained husbandly authority be respected?