Terri's Law: Sponsored by Kraft Cheese-James Wolcott

He makes the interesting connection between the Fundies romanticizing
both the unborn and a woman rendered unable to decide her own fate...

http://www.jameswolcott.com>

Conservatives enjoy railing against the "Oprahization" politics and culture,
the sentimentalizing of difficult issues by liberals and other softies. Rush
Limbaugh often says that the difference between conservatives and liberals
is that conservatives argue from reason, liberals from emotion. Which is
another way of saying conservatives are from Mars, liberals from sissy
Venus.

<snip>

Charles Krauthammer, who prides himself on the sardonic cut of his superior
mind and drips with so much distaste that he requires an oil change every
50,000 words, is the latest to get into the act.

<snip>

The column rises above Krauthammer's standard of bilious
character-assassination. For once, he seems to have put his sneer in the
denture cup to let it rinse. But the conservative agenda is still secure in
place. "There is no good outcome to this case. Except perhaps if Florida and
the other states were to amend their laws and resolve conflicts among
loved ones differently — by granting authority not necessarily to the spouse
but to whatever first-degree relative (even if in the minority) chooses life
and is committed to support it. Call it Terri's law. It would help prevent our
having to choose in the future between travesty and tragedy."

So if a wife believes her terminally ill husband would prefer to have life
support removed, his parents agree, but (say) a sister "chooses life" and
fights for custody, the sister's wishes should prevail over the wife's and
parents'? There's never going to be an easy way to adjudicate these
matters, and it would be characteristic of Republicans to pack something as
Lifetime-cable sounding as "Terri's Law" with all sorts of mischief. Particularly
since Krauthammer and his allies are rallying around Terri as if she were a
large-scale fetus, which explains the use of the code phrase "innocent life"
used by Randall Terry and others to describe her. As one of the vigilants,
sounding tired and sad beyond his years, complained on cable news today,
"Between abortion and euthanasia, it seems like they got you coming or
going." Fostering a "culture of life" is just another way of trying to control
women's bodies, which is what animates conservative mullahs, even to the
point of trying yet again to subvert women's college athletics and Title IX.

I almost fell off my chair at the conclusion of his post about Adam Nagourney's asskissing NYTimes article about Jeb Bush: