Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that in his absence there has been a big spat of posting concerning Terri Schiavo. Many have chosen to respond to the thoughtful posts of the Smallholder on this topic. And the AP news wire shows that a federal judge is determining if the feeding tube should be replaced.

Your Maximum Leader hopes to write something more thoughtful on this subject later today. Until then allow him to go on the record with his feelings of total disgust at our Federal Government in this matter. While this is a grave and serious issue, it is a grave and serious issue for the state of Florida and the families involved. It is not, under any stretch of the imagination a federal matter.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has returned to the Villainschloss. Well… To be quite honest, he returned on Saturday. But various family responsibilities kept him pretty busy all weekend. (Not to mention that he needed time to allow his liver to recover…)

Vegas was reat. In keeping with his own (and the Las Vegas Tourism Bureau’s) motto, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” it must suffice to say that he had a great time and did enjoy himself while he was away.

Your Maximum Leader will need some time to get back into his routine, so anticipate light posting over the next day or two.

Many thanks to the Smallholder, Sexy Sadie, and the Big Hominid for their posts in your Maximum Leader’s absence.

Carry on.

I would love to revisit the old posts about how the Neo-Cons got it all wrong and that Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East is impossible.

This is so reminiscent of how Communism in the Old Soviet Union would never be defeated. It’s a good thing we had a president with vision then, and isn’t it great that we have one NOW?

And, have all those whining Democrat lefties who vowed that they were going to move to Canada gone?

Maybe our friend over at “Enjoy Every Sandwich” can shed some light on whether there has been an increase in the shoplifting in his stores.

Been bunkered in with the new wee one and is still trying to juggle my time.

Back to the trenches

Yesterday, my dad sent out this e-mail to his friends:

Can you remember what you were doing fifty years ago today?

I can. I was marching down Broadway in San Diego CA with the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines as we were welcomed back by a cheering crowd as heroes from Korea.

Times have changed.

I’m proud of what you did for the country, Pop!

HAPPY SAINT PADDY’S TO ALL AND SUNDRY!!

My dad loves those “five-in-one” apple trees sold by the various glitzy commercial nurseries. I remember getting in trouble a lot as a kid. Running spastically about the backyard, I would occasionally break off a branch of one of dad’s high-priced trees. So his five-in-one apple tree would become a four-in-one. Then a three-in-one. Then a two-in-one.

Pity Vater Smallholder. He would get so excited about his new tree and then his hyper little boy would maul it down into a mangy stump.

Today, dad has his own couple of acres of hilltop paradise and has planted quite the little home orchard for himself. Of course, the deer don’t understand that the fruit is supposed to be for humans. So the deer have taken over my role of maiming his apple trees. He even tried to convince the local game warden to give him a kill permit like I have so he could defend his trees with lethal force. Denied the license to kill, he has been known to spend Spring nights in a lawn chair in the front yard, rat terrier in his lap, ready to chase away any nighttime Bambi visitations.

Dad has been a great help around the farm and I have really enjoyed hanging out with him, so I bought him a present - participation in a grafting workshop. In compensation for the many trees I had maimed, I would take him to a class where he could learn how to make his own five-in-one trees. I signed us up for a grafting workshop hosted by Vintage Virginia Apples.

Vintage Virginia Apples is a tiny little family farm in North Garden, Va., just down the road from Sweet Seasons Farm. While it does not support the family as a fulltime occupation, three generations take time out from their “real” jobs to help run this wonderful little agricultural plot o’ land.

VVA is helping keep a wide selection of rare apple varieties alive, standing athwart the modern movement toward uniformity. They will sell you boutique apples, apple trees, and train small hobbyist “pomologists” in the art of orchard creation and maintenance.

The leader of the grafting workshop was none other than Tom Burford of the legendary Burford Borthers nursery in Monroe, Virginia.

Tom Burford!

Are you guys as thrilled as I was?

Probably not.

Tom Burford is a legend of the apple field. His family has been grafting apple trees since the 1700s. Tom is responsible for the (small) renaissance of neglected varieties in America.

Imagine if you went to an introductory guitar workshop and Eddie Van Halen was the teacher.

Or if you went to Catechism class and the Pope was standing at the front of the room.

I have several books on the old farm bookshelf that talk about Burford’s contributions to pomology.

The problem with having such esoteric interests is that no one really understands how exciting this was. My wife humors me. One of my teaching colleagues, upon hearing my tale, replied “Every day Iv m more and more shocked that youv re married.”

So I’m an orchard geek.

There were a fair number of people at the workshop. Some were simply backyard hobbyists. One woman was on vacation from her Californian bed and breakfast and wanted to learn how to graft the century-old apple trees on her property. When the historical trees succumbed to old age, she wanted clones ready to fill the gaps. One of my tablemates was in his early sixties and wanted to be able to preserve the varieties from his grandmother’s farm. The whole room was full of affable apple aficionados from widely divergent backgrounds.

But as interesting as the other workshop participants were, it was Tom Burford at the head of the class!

Where else will you find an agrarian who spices his lectures with phrases like “Call me a Luddite, but I think he loss of historical flavors is a great tragedy?”

Tom opened his talk by discussing why we needed to have a workshop at all. Knowledge of grafting used to be well nigh universal. But World War II acted as an historical interrupter. Young men went off to war, came back to college on the G.I. Bill, and moved to the suburbs. Away from home in the years they would have been learning how to make new trees, they then acquired the affluence to buy ready-made trees. Specialty nurseries began to make trees for the Harry homeowner market - and they tended to focus on a few varieties to streamline their inventories. At the same time, the introduction of the interstate highway system and the growing interstate nature of the agricultural trade led commercial orchards to concentrate on apple varieties with long shelf lives and/or attractive outer coverings. Taste was sacrificed on the altar of commercialism.

But a few small nurseries kept the old flavors alive.

Now I’m doing my part.

Please excuse any typos in this post. I’m typing with a bandaged finger. While doing my part to keep the old flavors alive, I slipped with the grafting knife and gouged out a dime-sized (though shallow) chunk of my pointer finger. Apple grafting workshops are not for sissies. One woman had to go the emergency room and one of my tablemates ought to have gone. There were probably a half-dozen minor gouges like mine.

But the blood was worth it.

I walked out with six new trees:

An Albemarle Pippin

A Arkansas Black

An Ashmead’s Kernel

A Black Twig

A Grimes Golden

A Summer Rambo

All in all, a cool day. Hangin’ mit Vater Smallholder, learning from a celebrity, and getting new trees for the orchard. Is there anyone out there who can understand my joy?

The internet is a funny thing. You can run into people who share your unusual hobbies. I got an e-mail from Australia last month from a hobby farmer who likes Ayrshires as much as I. I wonder if any of our readers are amateur pomologists? Let me know!

Intelligent design advocates frequently say they only want to provide balance and to “teach the controversy.”

The problem is that there is no real controversy. Intelligent design is not accepted as science, in much the same way the holocaust deniers are not accepted as historians. Both intelligent design advocates and holocaust deniers fail to follow the established methodology in “their” respective disciplines.

Americans have come to believe that opposing views should be given equal time. But sometimes this valuable belief has been stretched to ridiculous extremes.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Richard Cohen writes about the ridiculousness of C-Span wanting to “balance” a historian with a holocaust denier. Really. I’m not making this up. Go read.

As I read Cohen’s article, the analogy to intelligent design became clearer and clearer.

Ally objects (as I knew she would) to my piece on the Schiavo situation.

Before I address her points, let me make clear that the quotation marks around the word “conservative” were not intended to negatively characterize conservatives in general. The intent was to highlight the point that those who want the government to intervene in the dying process are hardly acting conservatively - inasmuch that conservatives generally believe in individual free will and a minimum of government intrusion in our lives.

Go read Ally’s post. I’ll wait.

Ally writes:

1. Terry is not in a persistent vegetative state. She is brain damaged, and has
had no therapy. I have seen video footage of Terry smiling and laughing, holding
her mother’s hand, and looking in her mother’s eyes. Her parent’s claim that
they showed the footage to a doctor, who claimed he could work Terry and help
her speak and regain movement again. The woman is brain damaged, so no, she is
never going to be the Terry Schiavo she was. However, certainly, it is worth
looking into the therapy that might help her regain a little of who she is.

First of all, my understanding is that she had extensive therapy against the advice of doctors back in 1990. The doctors pointed out that her cerebral cortex was destroyed by her heart attack. Both her husband and parents sought therapy anyway, even moving her out of state to California for additional therapy when Terri was unresponsive to the therapy she was receiving in Florida. All in all, she had FOUR years of therapy with no improvement.

In fact, let’s not use the phrase “no improvement.” Evidently, because her body continued to breathe despite the death of her brain, her body kept trying to heal the brain damage and gradually filled the space that once contained her cerebral cortex with spinal fluid.

Eventually, Michael realized that his wife was dead. Although he had been cooperating with Terri’s parents for four years, he became irritated that they would not acknowledge reality and moved out of their house and began trying to withdraw the maintenance of Terri’s body. (The move out of the parents’ house also involved an argument over splitting the proceeds of the malpractice settlement.)

The gambit of trying to give her new “therapy” is an attempt by the parents to make Michael look bad. If, as all the diagnostic tests and doctors are correct, there is not much “therapy” can do to teach spinal fluid to act as a conscious mind.

Ally also writes:

2. Michael Schiavo has consistently tried to end Terry’s life. There are nurses
who took care of her who were willing to testify that he would call in and ask
if “the bitch” had died yet. He was given the insurance monies, with which he
swore he would take care of her and get her therapy - which he has not done. He
has prevented her from having dental exams, female exams, etc. Her blinds are
not allowed to be raised, and he frequently bans her parents from going to see
her. And of course, he is living with another woman and has children with her.
I’m not thinking he’s a real good cheerleader to have on Terry’s side.

Um, Michael clung to hope for FOUR years. Hell, I would have realized the inevitable well before that. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one look at my beloved Uncle John’s MRI was enough for me to know that he was well and truly gone. So Michael deluded himself for four years. This is understandable v± denial is a powerful thing. Terri’s parents have constructed an elaborate fantasy over the last fifteen years. The fact that Michael has grieved for his wife, and moved on after a decade - finding a new life partner isn’t particularly appaling.

Ally then writes:

3. The judge has never been to see Terry, and doctors who are paid for by
Michael is the only testimony he has heard.

Does Ally really believe that the doctors are really part of some anti Terri cabal? That the doctors at her various treatment facilities have all somehow been bought off by Michael? This beggars the imagination. The party line about the bias of the doctors has been trumpeted by the pro-life fringe movement so often that people have come to accept it uncritically. I would ask Ally to stop and think about this for a couple of minutes. Does it really seem plausible that ALL the medical professionals who have worked with Terri are venal bribe-taking murderers? That none of them have a conscience? Are they faking the MRIs showing the spinal fluid where the cortex ought to be? Are all the MRI technicians bought off?

As to the judge meeting Terri - why would he? When all the medical professionals say that she is brain dead, what would his visiting her hospice bed add? Note that Terri’s parents could not produce any medical professionals who would testify that she is not in a persistant vegetative state. They did find two guys (hmmm, sought out and paid for by them), who, without actually examining Terri, opined that there were new therapies being developed that might be tried- but had no medical literature with which to back their claims.

Let’s pause and weight the testimony for a second. The pro-life folks want us to believe that two isolated doctors are telling the truth and every other doctor is lying? That the one doctor who was specifically sought out to a party in the case is more reliable than all the doctors who were not selected by any party but only became part of the case when Terri entered their facility?

Ally, while agreeing with me* that “Michael’s character, while dubious and disgusting, has nothing to do with the case itself. People get caught up in hating him, and forget the reality and law of the case,” still seems to be caught up in the “conflict of interest” issue:

She writes:

Given that Michael has clearly conflicting interests, why shouldn’t her family
be in charge of Terry’s fate? THERE IS NO LIVING WILL STATING SHE WANTED TO DIE IF IN SUCH A SITUATION.

I assume this is a reference to the fact that Michael will inherit Terri’s estate when she dies. I am not aware of the extent of the estate, but it would have to be substantial if it is worth a decade of legal wrangling. And if Michael does have this financial conflict of interest, doesn’t that mean that her parents do too? If the Schiavos are divorced, wouldn’t that shift the estate to her parents as next of kin? And wasn’t part of their falling out with Michael financial?

As to the living will, Ally is correct. This underscores the importance of everyone getting a living will. But the court judge found that there was clear evidence of Terri’s beliefs on the matter. See the court ruling here - scroll down to pages five and six. The only person to argue that Terri would want to live was her mother - whose memory of a decades-old event suddenly became clearer between deposition and trial and was clearly in conflict with chronology. Go ahead and read the court ruling - it is pretty damning of the mother’s testimony.

Keep reading through the court opinion - it shows that the testimony that Terri is brain dead was UNREFUTED:

“The medical evidence before this court conclusively established that she has no
hope of ever regaining consciousness and therefore capacity, and that without
the feeding tube she will die in seven to fourteen days. The UNREBUTTED
(emphasis Smallholder’s) testimony before this court is that such death would be
painless…

…The overwhelming credible evidence (overwhelming the
duly noted mother’s “perceptions” - Smallholder) is that Terri Schiavo has been
totally unresponsive since lapsing into the coma almost ten years ago, that her
movements are reflexive and predicated on brain stem activity alone, that she
suffers from severe structural brain damage and to a large extent her brain has
been replaced by pinal fluid, that with the exception of one witness whom the
court finds to be so biased as to lack credibility, her movements are occasional
and totally consistent with the testimony of the expert medical witnesses.
The testimony of Dr. Barnhill establishes that Terri Schiavov s reflex actions
such as breathing and movement shows merely that her brain stem and spinal cord
are intact…

…the UNREBUTTED (Emphasis Smallholder again) evidence
remains that Terri Schiavo remains in a persistent vegetative state.”

Whew. Given that the Schiavos had the immense resources of both the pro-life movement and (later) the governor’s mansion and were still unable to even challenge the medical evidence is pretty telling. Unable to win on the medical level, the Schiavos and the pro-life crowd behind them have turned to public opinion. The parents and not the facts seem to be winning, at least in this little corner of the blogosphere.

I await Ally’s reply. Unless of course, you humble servant of the soil is unrebuttable.

FOOTNOTE: Links to court decisions found here.

* After reading the court decisions, it appears that I was a bit hasty in condemning Michael - he appears very differently when not viewed through the prism of the Schindler’s propaganda machine.

As a public school teacher, I ought not to tell kids that I am praying for them when there are difficult things happening in their lives. So I frequently tell them that I’ll “hold a good thought” for them.

But I need not be so nonsectarian in the blogosphere.

So send your prayers out to:

Acidman - Condolences on the loss of your mother.

Sadie - We hope your dogbit family member heals rapidly.

Brian B. - We hope the Feared Redhead will get what she wants, and if not, that you are able to keep the wolves at bay for as long as necessary.

Supershadow.com has a scene-by-scene description (yes, it’s merely text, not images) of the newest “Revenge of the Sith” trailer. His site also contains all the info you’ll ever need about the plot of the movie, from beginning to end. His latest spoiler tells us how Anakin loses his limbs and goes into the lava.

Question for the politics hounds: if “liberal” and “conservative” could be viewed as extremes on a sliding scale (I don’t seriously believe this, but let’s assume it for the sake of argument), is Darth Vader more a liberal or a conservative? I’ve noticed that, in the real world, one side usually accuses the other of some form of fascism or totalitarianism– conservatives want to legislate morality, Bush is creating a police state, etc.; meanwhile, liberals are closet commies, being transnational progressivists who erroneously believe humanity is perfectible, science is the answer rather than tradition, and a utopian state of affairs is possible…

Where does Vader fit? He’s obviously not a democrat (in the lower-case “d” sense); “Attack of the Clones” made clear that he’s got nothing against dictatorships. He’s a highly religious dude, being a Force user and Jedi/Sith. At the same time, he’s conversant with the latest technology (young Anakin was good at repairing things, you’ll recall), which bespeaks a techie/scientific side. He’s part of a revolution to overthrow the Old Republic, but he’s also called to preserve the new order.

What is Darth Vader? A liberal or a conservative?

UPDATE: The “Revenge of the Sith” preview is now available for all to watch over at StarWars.com.

_

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is, once again, letting everyone know that he will be in Las Vegas, Nevada next week. During that time he does not anticipate that he will be blogging. If you would like a shot at guest blogging here, you need to let him know before Saturday evening.

So far, the lovely and talented (and downright sexy) Sadie has signed on for at least one post. One can hope that the Smallholder, Poet Laureate, Foreign Minister, Air Marshal, or Minister of Propaganda might decide to have a go at it as well.

So, if you want to guest blog, notify your Maximum Leader at: maxldr-blog -at- yahoo.com.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has made a second contribution as a guest blogger for Sadie.

Feel free to cruise over and read: Fistful of Fortnights: Knowing Sadie’s Love of Tarantino…

Carry on.

Deep in the bowels of Las Vegas’s swankest casinos, a new bloodsport has come into prominence. Only the richest, the most privileged, the most powerful people have even a ghost of a chance of sitting cageside. The event features two of the most vicious creatures ever to come into conflict in the history of life on this planet. They reenact a drama once played out in the Black Forest before crowds of cheering Prussians. What sport could this be?

Dwarf versus Doberman Pinscher Mortal Combat.

And who, you ask, has orchestrated this event for the past ten years?

Your Maximum Leader, the most avid dwarf-abuser of them all.

A Doberman Pinscher’s bite exerts well over three hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. A dwarf, properly goaded, can bite through jail bars. The Doberman’s main advantages: agility, a seeming immunity to pain, and the drive to rip out the opponent’s throat. The dwarf’s main advantages? A specialized version of jujitsu crafted by Japanese dwarves centuries ago to deal with dog attacks… and a very short neck.

Martial dwarf versus mad Doberman: who will win?

I’d give anything to be cageside for the main event: a long-awaited match between über-dwarf Ball Scar and the terrifying, dwarf-slaughtering Doberman known only as Lilly. Perhaps our Maximum Leader will return from Vegas with photos of the latest “Extreme Dwarferman,” but we know his personal rule is “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” The masses can only stand and wait with bated breasts. Pray for pictures.

_

This post will probably get me famed. I know that Ally (God bless her feisty little redheaded heart) is probably already breaking out the butane.

Read my earlier post first.

Many of the conservative bloggers in Naked Villainy’s little corner of the blogosphere have taken a stand beside the parents of Terri Schiavo.

For a quick sample, see:

Cranky Necon

Common Sense Runs Wild, a stronger case here.

Sadie actually has a sidebar category.

Brutally Honest

Common Sense has a link to a set of videos that purport to show Terri demonstrating intellectual activity. Supposedly, these videos would convince anyone that she is not vegetative. They didn’t convince me. More importantly, they didn’t convince Terri’s doctors, who have much more sophisticated diagnostic methods than “Look! She blinks at a set of flashing lights!”

Absent from any of the histrionic defense of Terri’s life is any sense that Terri’s life ended years ago. Her body may keep running along, but Terri is gone. I have yet to see a SINGLE doctor describe her as being in anything other than a persistent (read: permanent) vegetative state.

One can understand her parents taking up permanent residence in the state of denial. Losing a child is the absolute worst thing I can imagine. I can see that it would be very easy that their hope and love would lead them to see awareness that simply isn’t there. As described in the previous post, if my family had not been solidly grounded in reality, they might have interpreted Uncle John’s body’s groans when they turned him over to be examples of him reacting to external stimuli.

Hell, I remember pithed frogs reacting to external stimuli when we hooked up small batteries in biology class. Reaction to external stimuli does not mean that someone is not in a vegetative state.

We can assume that both Terri’s parents and her husband might be biased (and the husband’s conduct in this has been far from exemplary). The parents, Mr. Schiavo, Terri’s lawyers, or the general blogging community have the medical expertise to diagnose brain activity. The doctors seem to be unanimous. Perhaps - and I’m going out on a limb here - they are right.

(If any of Naked Villainy’s readers are doctors with neurological expertise, please watch Common Sense’s videos. If you believe that they show brain activity, please e-mail me and I’ll have to reconsider the thesis of this post).

If she is indeed brain dead, then all of the rest of the hub-bub becomes moot. A dead person, by definition, has no right to life. If she is dead, then who the hell are we to tell the husband what to do with the body?

The Pro-Terri camp will respond to this by saying, well, there have been (a few, isolated, exceedingly rare) cases in which someone deemed to be in a persistent vegetative state has recovered. Shouldn’t we keep all vegetative people alive and pray for a miracle?

I have a question for you “conservatives” out there. If we grant that one in ten thousand of patients diagnosed as brain dead one day make a miraculous recovery, who ought to pay for the hideous medical expense of caring for those in vegetative states for years.

It is hard to put a price on life. But we live in the real world. If the people who are using Terri as a pro-life stalking horse want to keep everyone like Terri or my Uncle alive indefinitely, do they expect every member of society to contribute to their maintenance through higher insurance premiums? Or should we rise taxes and let the government take over the medical costs? Should we shift resources away from government programs that have actual benefits so that we can support folks who, 99.9999% of the time will gain absolutely no benefit from it?

I have another question for you “conservatives” out there. Should the government be involved in making this very personal decision for you? Or should the citizens control their own lives and deaths? Do “conservatives” really want to allow democratic majorities to trump individual and familial decision-making? I recognize that the issue of whether Terri would have wanted to live in a persistent vegetative state is in dispute; certainly we can’t take Mr. Schiavo’s testimony at face value. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the pro-Terri camp would like to prevent the deaths of people who HAVE clearly expressed their desire to die should they ever face a similar situation.

Let me state right now, as clearly as possible, that if I suffer a catastrophic brain injury, I want to die. Keep me alive long enough to harvest the organs, then let me die. If any of you delusional and misguided Christians file a lawsuit to prevent my wishes from being carried out in the misguided delusion that I might be miraculously saved, you better hope that I don’t get that miracle. If I do, I’m ordering my big toe to twitch, crawling out of the hospice, getting my 307, and coming to get you. Really. If I’m not allowed to die, someone else is going into the ground.

Obviously, I’m passionate about my own right to die should the unthinkable happen. My Christian beliefs have no conflict with letting my shell go. I’m dead and my soul has gone to its reward. Why should the belief system of some meddlesome do-gooder from outside my family trump my expressed desires? Why should the state favor the do-gooder’s religious beliefs over mine?

Pro-Terri advocates frequently tie their “culture of life” into the pro-life movement.

The status of the unborn and the brain dead are not morally equivalent. A fetus’ potential for life outweighs the extinguished potential of someone in a vegetative state. Whether the fetus is already a human being is something about which reasonable people can disagree. Whether the fetus has the potential to be a human being is indisputable. The destruction of the brain destroys personhood. Potential has run its course.

Another troubling element of the movement to pro-long Terri’s death is the precedent that is being set. While her husband does indeed appear to be a bit shady (but perhaps I have just been overwhelmed by the “save Terri” propaganda), this case will set a precedent. Do we want parents to be able to override the judgment of spouses? To be able to override the expressed wishes of their child? Don’t even get me started about how some estranged parents have abused their legal ability to trump the wishes of long-term homosexual partners.

Flow chart:

1) Does Terri have brain function?
a) If you believe the professionals who have tested diagnostic tools -> She has already died. All other arguments are about burial arrangements.
b) If you believe the naturally unobjective parents -> She does not. Go to point 2.

2) Terri has severely limited brain function. Would Terri want to live that way?
a) Terri’s husband is telling the truth. She would want to die. Go to point 3.
b) Terri’s husband is a lying dog. Terri never expressed her wishes one way or the other. Go to point 5.

3) Terri wants to die. Should individuals be allowed to make life or death decisions for themselves?
a) Yes. Let her die. All other arguments are about burial arrangements.
b) No. Life is precious. Go to point 4.

4) The government is keeping Terri alive against her wishes. Who should pay?
a) The insurance company. We all, including those who disagree with the decision to keep her alive, pay through higher premiums.
b) The government. We all, including those who disagree with the decision to keep her alive, pay through higher taxes or reduced services.
c) Private contributors. Will all vegetative victims have patons? Who will assign responsibility?

5) Terri’s wishes are unclear. Who should make the decision for people who leave no living will?
a) The spouse or next of kin. In this case, let her die. All other arguments are about funeral arrangements.
b) Parents. Go to point 6.

6) Do the parents believe in prolonging life?
a) Yes. Go to point 4.
b) No. Go to point 7.

7) If the parents and spouse are against prolonging life, what interests trump family interests?
a) The government. Let the current ideology of the mob prevail. When the mob’s collective mind changes, change policy. Also go to point 4 for payment.
b) Christian groups. Go to point 8.
Which Christian group’s theology will be favored by the government?
a) Absolute right-to-lifers. Throw out the First Amendment. Establish theocracy and oppress progressive Christians. Go to point 4 for payment.
b) Progressive Christians. Throw out the First Amendment. Establish theocracy and oppress fundamentalist Christians. Let her die. All other arguments are about funeral arrangements. Wait - hold that - there are no other arguments because we live in a theocracy. Conform, sinners.

Would someone from the “pro” Terri camp explain to me the legal precedent they are trying to set here?

UPDATE: A commenter at the Hyscience site says: “This poor woman just needs nursing care, and God-willing that we see her being blessed with a miraculous recovery.” This sounds just like my ne’er-do-well cousin.

Two years ago, my Uncle John had a massive stroke.

The MRIs showed three quarters of his brain had been destroyed by the bleeding. I still remember the pictures - a malignant stain spreading from one hemisphere to the other.

Uncle John was a hale and hearty man at 79. He might have had a paunch (what male member of the Smallholder clan doesn’t), but he was strong and fit. He worked on the day he died.

The day he died his body kept breathing. Everything that made John, well, John, disappeared as the ruptured veins drowned his cerebral cortex. The mind and soul were gone. All that was left was a shell.

After the doctors confirmed that there was no chance of recovery, my family moved its patriarch to a hospice. Withholding food and water, they tended his shell for days until the stubborn body shut down.

At the funeral, my cousins talked about how hard it was to care for the shell. To have to clean up the natural processes of their formerly proud and independent father was heartbreaking. Occasionally, John’s body would groan and twitch. Now, being the sturdy, pragmatic types produced by diary farms throughout the Midwest, they intellectually realized that those groans, sighs, and spasms were artifacts of the dying process, not John’s attempts to send message to his family. But it was still hard.

Another cousin, a black sheep of the family (my father says that after you shake hands with him, you ought to count your fingers), has become born again. Born again in a way that lets you feel morally superior without imposing inconvenient restrictions on your own behavior. At family gatherings, his unctuous, oily demeanor always drives me to flee to the other side of the room.

This guy walks up to John’s kids and says: “It was wrong to take him out of the hospital. If you had left him on life support, God might have miraculously healed your father.”

Johnny told him that that would have been fine if he was willing to move his born-again backside to Elkhorn and spend his life wiping his uncle’s butt.

Johnny was kinder than I would have been. When Johnny related this conversation, I wanted to walk across the room and pop said holier-than-thou miracle boy in the nose.