Here’s another version of the question I posed this morning. It’s an email I just received::
What if the situation were exactly the same, with the exact same people hearing the exact same things that she supposedly said? Except her side of the family agreed that removing the tube would be the best thing because they agreed her quality of life and her hope for recovery was zero. Not because they could point to a like expression of her wishes.
Then this would never have gotten to the courts, but the moral arguments for not killing her, and for violating her civil rights would be exactly the same.
The only solution in such a situation would be that lawyers and the government would have to get involved at that point, in EVERY similar situation. Fine. Is that what society wants?
It’s what the religious right logically must want: a huge expansion of government power to ensure that all life is held sacred at every point of the process that they consider relevant, i.e. no abortion, no living wills, no scintilla of a right to die. That agenda isn’t explicit now. But it is implicit. And what happens when a person on life support, legally required to be kept alive, doesn’t have the resources to maintain the care? Of course, the government must step in, to provide the funds necessary to keep someone from being murdered. When you think of the religious right vision of the benevolent, big “Christian” state, is it any surprise that Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader are on their side?
The Dish 