Ideological absolutism and Terry Schiavo

Francis Porretto writes about Terry Schiavo:

Let's be perfectly candid about what Michael Schiavo intends for his helpless wife: he wants her dead. His claim that she would want the same is hopelessly tainted by his pecuniary interest in her demise. He insists on killing her even though the sole legal way to get her into her coffin is to subject her to two weeks of excruciating torment.

Were a condemned serial killer to be sentenced to the same ordeal, every civil-rights and humanist group in the country would be up in arms. Nay, it would arouse every such group in the world. Such groups cannot abide the death penalty even for men convicted of the most heinous crimes. The United States would be castigated in every organ known to Man for its callousness, its brutality, and its lack of respect for human life.

Strangely, those groups have been quite silent about the plight of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. A few have even trumpeted the "right to die" mantra, as if they possessed telepathic time-travel powers that allow them to read Terri's desires retroactively from this point in time.

To tell you the truth, I'm actually more sympathetic to her husband than to the pro-death activists and the judge. He's killing her for money (and also possibly to cover up evidence of previous crimes). This is an exaggerated form of the sort of base evil to which all of us are occasionally tempted (although thankfully the overwhelming majority of us have the moral strength to resist). It is profoundly evil, but it is nevertheless comprehensible. I can see myself in his shoes, although I pray I'd never make his choices, no matter the circumstances.

But to torture this woman (and forced starvation constitutes torture by any recognized definition of the word...even on the Left) purely for the advancement of an abstract principle about the right to die, as the judge and the pro-death activists are doing, is a truly incomprehensible abomination.

It is indeed an echo of the abortion debate, where the issue is so fiercely polarized that pro-choice forces are finding themselves arguing that there's no moral difference between expelling a microscopic clump of cells and killing a viable infant in mid-birth, but that there is a difference between killing the infant during birth and killing it immediately afterward.

In service to their ideology they've entirely sacrificed both reason and humanity. Compared to that, a man who wants to kill his wife for money is easy to sympathize with.

Short of a patient who's sitting up in bed screaming and begging for her life, there really aren't any worse example cases for the pro-euthanasia argument than this one.

Mr. Porretto and I differ in our beliefs about abortion and euthanasia. I believe there are circumstances in which both are acceptable in a least-of-all-available-wrongs sense, whereas he, as I understand his beliefs, does not accept any set of circumstances in which either would be an acceptable choice. I can respect that...especially since my moral views are far closer to his than my pro-choice stand would imply.

But only someone so fanatical about their ideology that they're incapable of true thought or feeling would think that the Terry Schiavo case is anything but an argument against sanctioned euthanasia...and a compelling one at that.

Watching pro-euthanasia forces on the wrong side of Terry Schiavo may well turn me against euthanasia, just as watching pro-choice activists fight for "partial birth abortion" has all but completely turned me against abortion.