Michelle Goldberg, in her Daily Beast piece, proves that liberals have an absolute love affair with death as she compares the fight for a woman’s right for contraception with that of the fight Terri Schiavo‘s husband (Michael) waged to end her life, after many years in a vegetative state. Liberals have no respect for life. That includes pro-abortion women (and men) who demand a right to access contraception (free if at all possible) which is intended to end the life of an unborn child already created in the womb, and Michael Schiavo who demanded the right to remove his wife’s feeding tubes and let her die of starvation and dehydration.
Michael won his battle, despise the pleas from Terri’s parents who begged Michael to relinquish his rights over Terri to them. It has always been troubling as to why he never did. Michael had insisted all along Terri had once told him that if she was ever to become in such a state of being she would not want to live like that. However, there was never any actual proof Terri said this. Just Micheal’s word as her husband. And because husbands and wives have certain rights in regards to how their spouses are dealt with in such situations, spouses can legally, and literally, make life and death decisions for each other when and if there is not already a living will, or some form of documentation left by either spouse to let the other, and the law, know exactly how they wish to be treated when they can no longer speak, or think, for themselves.
What has always been troubling about Michael and his attitude towards Terri is that it is common knowledge Michael wanted to remarry. He couldn’t do that so long as Terri was still alive and while he was still legally, in the eyes of the law, her husband. And that is the most damning, the most disturbing nuance of this whole battle that, for some weeks, surrounded Terri Schiavo. Her own parents were willing to become her legal guardians, thereby removing Michael from any legal responsibility as her husband – and he could have divorced her as well, paving the way for him to remarry the woman he was seeing while Terri lay in a vegetative state. That would have ended the drama which played on the news for all the days and weeks this case made national headlines.
Michael didn’t take that opportunity. He didn’t choose life. He opted for her death. And the speculation that surrounded him then, as to why he didn’t, still persists and swells to this day. Was Michael Schiavo in some way the cause his wife’s condition that left her in a vegetative state for so many years? And would Terri be able to relate some type of incriminating information against Michael to her parents, and police, if she ever woke from her vegetative state? Michael has never been able to completely answer why he simply didn’t give up his rights as her husband, and legal guardian, and allow Terri’s parents to assume responsibility.
We can not call Michael a murderer outright because that would be both slander and libel. But the insinuation, the innuendo, the implication and the accusation is nonetheless embedded within the thought. Terri did not need to die, she did not have to die, and whether or not she wanted to die is speculative at best. The same is true with unborn children. They do not need to die, they do not have to die, and would they want to die any more than Terri would have wanted to die because, as in the case of unborn children, their mothers do not wish to give them life?
Terri might still be alive today. With medical advancements, she might even have improved. But because her life was ended in such a brutal, sadistic and inhumane way – a way in which we would never treat a death row inmate or a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, for that matter – we will never have the opportunity to know if Terri might have lived, if she might have improved, if she might have regained enough of her motor skills and speaking skills to relay any words or messages to her parents. And that probably suits Michael Shiavo just fine.
And it suits all liberals, who have the “culture of death” attitude, just fine. And it is the reason why Michelle Goldberg uses Terri, her death in particular, as an example and a comparison between contraception and who has what controls over whose body and whose life. Michelle Goldberg, as with all liberals, do not value the lives of the unborn any more than that valued the life of Terri Schiavo. Which is interesting, from a feminist point of view, because here you have a man who wanted to end a woman’s life. One might assume feminists would have been outraged. They weren’t.
Terri, apparently, was of no use, of no value, to liberal feminists in her vegetative state. And because liberals, as a body of people, are really nothing more than small collections of people whose ideas are in the minority, the only way they can succeed in their own goals is to band together to thwart conservatism, which as a body, and a percentage of American people, has, if not a majority, a much closer one than do liberals, and a higher percentage of people within its base than have liberals. In other words, whether feminists approved of how the Terri Schiavo case was handled, feminists, being in a minority, could not risk angering the pro-assisted suicide supporters, another minority, with whom they need on their side as much as the pro-assisted suicide crowd needs the pro-abortion crowd on its side.
Michelle Goldberg asks whether or not, within the contraception debate, this is a “Terry Schiavo moment”. It is, but not for the liberal, “culture of death” reasoning they give. The “moment” which may be that in geologic terms, has been an ongoing “moment” for decades. The “moment” is the ongoing debate in America that will decide whether or not life as any value at all, and who is control of deciding matters of life, and matters of death – and who has the right to decide such matters. The “moment” is also an ongoing debate to decide exactly what life is and what life means.
The “Terri Schiavo moment”, from the liberal viewpoint, is fertile in the concept that death not only has more value than live, but that death itself is a value; and women who want the right to end their unborn child’s life with whatever contraception they choose must have, and retain, their right to do so.
Death with dignity is one thing. However, where is the dignity in ending someone’s life, as Michael Schiavo ended his wife’s life, by starvation and dehydration? Where is the dignity in ending someone’s life by plunging a needle into their skull in order to deflate it enough so it can be pulled from the womb without making its mother too “uncomfortable” in the process; or ripping its body parts into pieces and removing it from the womb piece by piece; or sucking it out entirely if it is small enough?
Conservatives support real “death with dignity”. We don’t support murder. And we don’t support redefining murder in legal terms so that murder becomes legally sanctioned by the state, by government and protected by the Constitution. Morally and ethically abortion is murder. That the state has legalized it does not change that fact. What happened to Terri Schiavo was murder. That the state of Florida sanctioned it does not change that fact.
Equating contraception, and the fight to control access to it, as being a part of a woman’s overall “health”, with that of Terri Schiavo is yet another example of feminists, and liberals, like Michelle Goldberg, acting stupidly and irrationally. What liberals are fighting for is contraception that ends and removes an unwanted living child from a mother’s womb and her life. What Michael Schiavo fought for was to end and remove a living woman, an obstacle, from his life so he could live his life anew. In each case death, and the killing of a life, and a living human being, is the result.
If there is indeed a “Terri Schiavo moment” which there ought to be, it ought to be a teachable moment for all of us. Liberals, like Michelle Goldberg – like all the usual suspects, Planned Parenthood, NOW, NARAL, Cecile Richards, Terry O’Neill, all liberal feminists, all liberals, the entire American Left, the Democrat Party, including President Barack Obama who himself supports infanticide – all support death more than they support life; support fighting for death more than they support fighting for life; support legal and Constitutional rights which guarantees them the freedom to commit certain and specific acts which lead to death in “privacy”.
What the “Terri Schiavo moment” ought to teach us is what the vast and fundamental differences are in terms of morals and values between liberals (their “culture of death”) and conservatives (their “culture of life”). Millions of unborn children are not now alive today because of the “culture of death” liberals have waged against life. Terri Schiavo is not now alive today because of that same success, that same “culture of death” which epitomizes the liberal mindset.
What the “Terri Schiavo moment” ought to teach us is that if we don’t continue to fight the Left, and their “culture of death”, if we don’t continue to oppose them, if we instead give up and give in because it is an exhausting, unending process, particularly with regards to attempting to pass legislation and laws which we know will be challenged in every court in America; because the time, the money invested, often in vain (in terms of having these laws overturned by legislatures and courts) may become too much for us, financially and emotionally, to bear – if we cannot remain strong and courageous in our resolve to fight for a “culture of life”, life itself, and the right to live, will lose all value, all meaning, all rights.
What price are we willing to put on life? Because we know the Left puts a big fat zero on life. We know the Left has put, and invested, an enormous price on death. And we know that the Left wants the price tag, the bill, associated with death to be yours to pay. Hence the contraception mandate forced on us by Barack Obama.
Someone has to pay for the “culture of death”. So too, someone has to pay for the “culture of life”. The question before the American people right now is, what is the price, the worth, and who pays? And who ultimately “pays” for a “culture of death”? And what does that “payment” for a “culture of death” ultimately mean to us and to American society? And once we have finished “paying” for a “culture of death”, can we ever return to a “culture of life”?
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