Lessons Learned When Lives Are Lost

From the pages of Life Matters! . . .

The lessons learned in the fight against euthanasia come at a very dear price, and if we ignore them, the cost will be higher still.

A Saintly Salmagundi's Fr. Bryce Sibley has kindly called our attention to several media "textbooks" worthy of our review.

Wrong Questions Yield Wrong Answers

For all the attention we have paid to the Schiavo case, we have asked many of the wrong questions, living as we do on the playing field of modern liberalism. We have asked whether she is really in a persistent vegetative state, instead of reflecting on what we owe people in a persistent vegetative state. We have asked what she would have wanted as a competent person imagining herself in such a condition, instead of asking what we owe the person who is now with us, a person who can no longer speak for herself, a person entrusted to the care of her family and the protection of her society. –Eric Cohen, "How Liberalism Failed Terri Schiavo," The Weekly Standard, March 25, 2005.

The Most Dangerous Branch of Government

Alexander Hamilton's famous last words in The Federalist described the judiciary as the "least dangerous branch," because it had neither force nor will. Now the judiciary is the most dangerous branch. It doesn't need force because it has smoke and mirrors and a lot of people defending the moronic scribblings of any judge as the perfect efflorescence of "the rule of law." –Anne Coulter, "The emperor's new robes," March 31, 2005.

The Most Derilect Branch of Government

Despite the outward appearance of deliberation, what we witness now as an ongoing feature of the conduct of the judiciary at every level amounts to a judicial riot, in which judges and justices take it upon themselves to disregard the prerogatives of the other branches in order to assert an exclusive and tyrannical control of public standards and conduct....

But in a constitutional system based on checks and balances, one branch can run riot only if some other branch fails to exert the power necessary to constrain its actions within constitutional bounds. This means that the rise of judicial tyranny represents a failure elsewhere in the government....

In the end, the constraint of judicial abuse is especially the responsibility of the executive branch of government, since the executive has both the opportunity and the obligation to act without the interference of the judiciary, provided that in doing so he consults the political will of the legislative power.

Until and unless the people elected to wield executive power in our national and state governments recognize and act upon this responsibility, the judiciary will go unchecked, destroying the balance of power among the branches and with it our system of free, representative self-government. –Alan Keyes, "Judicial review and executive responsibility," March 28, 2005.

License to Kill: An Uncivil Liberty

While lawyers and judges have engaged in a minuet of death, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die....

As David Gibbs, the lawyer for Terri's parents, has pointed out, there has been a manifest need for a new federal, Fourteenth Amendment review of the case because Terri's death sentence has been based on seven years of "fatally flawed" state court findings—all based on the invincible neglect of elementary due process by Judge George Greer.

I will be returning to the legacy of Terri Schiavo in the weeks ahead because there will certainly be long-term reverberations from this case and its fracturing of the rule of law in the Florida courts and then the federal courts. –Nat Hentoff, "Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder," The Village Voice, March 29, 2005.

And we, too, shall be return to it—again and again—in months and years to come.