<HTML><BODY STYLE="font:10pt verdana; border:none;"><DIV>J. Ford tells us that Doug Wilson says:<BR><BR>"In my view, now that all legal and constitutional appeals have been <BR>exhausted ... the authorities in Florida will not in able to say, "Well, we <BR>did everything we could do, and now we just have to let her die." They have <BR>not yet done everything they can do. Governor Bush now has a moral <BR>responsibility to send the National Guard to the hospital and have Terri <BR>Schiavo's feeding tube reattached."</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><BR>As many Barry Goldwater (as opposed to theocratic, religious right) conservatives have observed over the past week, if you genuinely believe in the "sure and certain hope of the resurrection," then how is it that Terri Shiavo's death is an absolute evil, and her life (and by life what they mean in Mrs. Shiavo's case is 15 years in a persistent vegetative state) an absolute good? </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Make no mistake: Terri Shiavo's case is tragic. I don't think slowly starving to death is a kind or humane way to end any life. If Mrs. Shiavo's husband and parents could have found some common ground; if Jeb Bush, and George Bush, and the Florida courts, and the Florida legislature, and the US Congress, and the federal courts had not stuck their enormous feet into the open door created by this family rift -- and by the willingness by some in the Pro-Life movment to exploit Mrs. Schiavo and her family for political gain -- then perhaps she could have died with dignity. Perhaps the feeding tube could have been removed, and she could have been given increasing doses of morphine until she was quietly and kindly "snowed" into the hereafter. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>These life and death decisions are made quietly and privately by families and physicians every day. This is how my own grandfather died in 2001, when he was ten days shy of his 82nd birthday. He was in the hospital in Raleigh, NC; he had pneumonia, an unidentified mass on his left lung, had suffered for nearly a decade from senile dementia, and he had, in the hospital, fallen into a coma. My mother, my sisters, and I all agreed that the best treatment for him was purely palliative care. No invasive procedures. No biopsy on his lung. (Though this was suggested by one doctor, we pointed out that my grandfather had smoked two packs a day for 67 years, so we really didn't need a biopsy to know what the mass was.) No feeding tube. No resuscitation. No heroic measures. Just enough morphine to ensure that he felt no pain, and his family to hold his hand and talk to him and reassure him that we loved him, and we believed that he would find peace and hope with a kind and loving God. We're a religiously eclectic bunch, but we all agreed on that much.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I don't know what I would do if I were Terri Shiavo's husband or her parents. But I do know that I sure as hell wouldn't want Jeb Bush marching the National Guard into my wife's or daughter's hospital room and ordering some poor nurse at gunpoint to reinsert a feeding tube. Welcome to the Wilson-Jones Vision of the World -- big government, but only in the service of a theocratic police state. How completely and utterly repugnant.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>And, dare I say it, how profoundly un-American.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment</DIV> <DIV><A href="http://www.auntie-establishment.com">www.auntie-establishment.com</A></DIV> <DIV> <BR><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML><br clear=all><hr>Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : <a href='http://explorer.msn.com'>http://explorer.msn.com</a><br></p>