If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

Thursday, March 24, 2005

The other day I blogged on the Sciavo case, where I expressed my feeling that the actions by Congress are a gross overstepping of their authority.  From reading comments around the blogosphere, and hearing the press conferences given by the Republican leadership, it seems that the general consensus from the Right is that every possible step should be taken, every legal avenue explored, every principle discarded, in order to spare this woman’s life.  Erring on the side of life, as the president put it, is a noble goal, but is this woman’s life worth the total disregard for the principles of states-rights and limited government that conservatives are supposed to stand for? 

Most people of a conservative bent support the death penalty, and are often outraged when we hear of convicted murderers spending 20 years on death row while their appeals make their way through the legal process.  Opponents will claim it is the height of injustice that the state is in a position where it could deny an innocent man his life, as punishment for a crime he did not commit.  Indeed, it was just a few years ago in Illinois that a number of men were released from death row after it was determined through DNA testing that they were innocent of they crimes of which they were accused.

So, for those of you who feel that we should pull out all the stops for Terri Schiavo, how can you also support a system by which an innocent man could be sentenced to death?  Let’s be honest here, Terri Schiavo is probably unaware of her surroundings, and will probably never improve from her current state.  Is preserving her life worth discarding the principles for which we pretend to stand?  As I said in my previous post, I don’t think it is.  We have a process by which these types of matters are determined, and I don’t believe in ignoring that process simply because we might not like the outcome.

Look at it this way.  Eventually the Democrats are going to regain control of Congress.  Would you support the Democrats passing this sort of “emergency legislation” to keep a live a man on death row for whom there was a large degree of exculpatory evidence?  If I’m being honest, I think an innocent man being executed would be a far greater tragedy than allowing a woman who has been in a vegetative state for 15 years to slip away into death.  So how do those of you who support the recent congressional actions reconcile these two opposing beliefs?

The Terri Schiavo case is a tragedy.  It’s tragic that she ended up in that state to begin with.  It’s tragic that a man loses his wife and a couple loses their daughter.  It’s tragic that any of them should be put in a position where they have to make the choice to discontinue life support.  (Trust me, I know firsthand how awful a thing this is to do.) And this whole legal debacle has been tragic, not only for the parties concerned but for the country as a whole.  But is it tragic enough to warrant this kind of a massive usurpation of government power?  I don’t think so.  There isn’t a single person reading this whose life means more than our system of government, mine included.  Since the founding of our nation and the adoption of the Constitution countless men have been asked to give their life in defense of these principles.  Is the life of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a vegetative state for 15 years, really worth discarding everything that those men fought and died for?

Not on your life.  Or mine.