The Grim Reaper

 

Today in the US Senate, the Democrats objected to a unanimous consent request to hear a bill aimed at saving Terry Shiavo's life.

Powerline notes a 2003 column by Yale Professor David Gelernter (a Unibomber victim, if I recollect well) regarding the attempts to kill Terry Schiavo in Florida. I find this passage most convincing:

When we have condemned a criminal to death, it is remarkable how patient we are in extending his life. So long as there are legal paths to follow, we follow them; and the courts are apt to postpone the execution. Both aspects of the process speak well for us: that we are willing (however painful it may be for us -- and it gets more painful every year) to execute murderers; and that we are in no hurry to, and will search on and on for a convincing reason not to.

With the likes of Mrs. Schiavo, we are a lot less patient. The governor can grant a stay of execution when a condemned murderer's life is on the line. Mrs. Schiavo's stay required that the whole Florida legislature mobilize for action. The frightening question is: What happens to the next Mrs. Schiavo? And the next plus a hundred or a thousand? How much attention will the public and the legislature be able to muster for this sort of thing over the years? The war against Judeo-Christian morality is a war of attrition. Time is on the instigators' side. They have all the patience in the world, and all the patients. If this one lives, there is always the next. After all, it's the principle of the thing.

For years, thoughtful people have argued that "reasons for taking a human life" should not be treated as a growing list. There are valid reasons to do it, and they have been agreed for millennia. If the list has to change, better to shorten than lengthen it.

Thoughtful people have argued: Once you start footnoting innocent human life, you are in trouble. Innocent life must not be taken... unless (here come the footnotes) the subject is too small, sick, or depressed to complain. One footnote, people have argued, and the jig is up; in the long run the accumulating footnotes will strangle humane society like algae choking a pond.

Who would have believed when the Supreme Court legalized abortion that, one generation later, only one, America would have come to this? Mrs. Schiavo's parents wanting her to live, pleading for her to live, the state saying no, and a meeting of the legislature required to pry the executioner's fingers from the victim's throat. 

I would never have made such an argument when the abortion decision came down, and I would never have believed it. I still can't believe it. Is this America? Do I wake or sleep?