Sarcastic posts aside, I have been a bit on the busy side the last week, and lacking in enough free time to try and post anything that makes any sense. It's a bit of a quiet afternoon, so now's my chance to dribble a little bit.
First, only because virtually everyone feels it's their duty to comment on it. Terri Schiavo. There. I said it. Having said it, this is probably the most sensible analysis I've read of the entire sideshow. That's what it's degenerated into. A fuckin' circus sideshow. And (if you can't tell), it pisses me off. Let the woman's body die in peace (the rest of her died 15 years ago, by all medical accounts). Most importantly, what business does anyone other than her husband have in deciding when to end life support? After all, don't these people respect the sanctity of marriage? And isn't one of the fundamental components of that institution that the person you're married to is you're next of kin, with the full legal authority to make chioces when you're unable to?
When talking to Republican friends of mine (yes, I do actually have friends that think differently than I do) they seem to deeply believe that the GOP is the "party of smaller government." Really? A party whose members want to control what you know about safe sex, when you conceive, if you're allowed to terminate the pregnancy, say nary a word about actually supporting children (score one point for a smaller government), now want to control when you can die? Is there nothing they don't want to control?
Yup, they are masochistic Puritans. They probably do want to hasten global warming in an effort to bring about the end of the world. Heck, I'm sure some of them can't orgasm unless they kill a dog. Ok, maybe that last one was a bit over the top. But really, when they're checking in to make sure that foreign policy doesn't delay the Rapture something is really wrong.
2 comments:
Having had a brother who lingered on in a persistent vegetative state for three years, I think I can understand many of the viewpoints of both the parents AND the husband. Still, at the very least, this case should hammer home the importance of drawing up a living will.
I've been talking this whole "smaller government" thing over with some righter-wing friends (it's surprisingly hard to find true conservatives in the Bay Area) and had one observation that might help:
The "small government" message was developed during the 40-some years of Democrat house control, prior to the "contract for America" elections back in the mid 90s. The repubs had to be a states rights/small government party because that's all they really held with any consistancy.
They didn't want "those darn feds" putting fingers into their pie.
Now that the republicans control, well... everything, they don't need to protect state rights anymore. State rights would only get in the way of the ability to forward their adgenda and syphon the treasury off to their supporters in big business.
So small-government/state rights/fiscal responsability only come up when it suits them. They are, after all, politicians. Of course I expect no less from the Democrats either, it just might take them a little longer.
--Josh A
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