Today's blog focusses on the
Terri Schiavo case (or
here, and here, but before you call, know that despite political maneuvering, a
compromise Terri's Law did pass.).
It is a great test case for
Declaration Principles, because it represents a new kind of challenge to the
principle that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness." Is Terri to be included in one of those "all",
or perhaps does Happiness preclude Life? Good questions, I'm glad you asked.
On Liberty
But before we answer those questions, I want to draw your attention to the
glut of Democrat angst out there, still commiserating over the unexpected 2004
elections. Democrats have made a lot of progress, and are beginning to understand the
conservative backlash that has produced erosion of the party vote
in almost every demographic category. One category that bucks the trend, becoming
even more solidly Democratic than ever, are "trustfunders".
Michael Barone, RCP explains who they are and where they are located. But if
you have to ask, you obviously aren't one.
Otherwise, the statistics are grim. Not
so much in the slim margins that brought President Bush to power, but the fact that
the margins are growing in every group. This despite the money,
the smarts,
the media,
the incumbency politics,
and the federal life support that in the past favored the Democratic Party. An interesting
meta-study by Robert Reich in The New Republic,
which could have been lifted straight out of the (Brandeis) University academe, tries
to find the cultural religion that explains or defines the American voter and reclaim
it for the Democratic party. He finds 4 "stories"
or plotlines that every leader must use to justify to the American public his decisions. He
envies Ronald Reagan's master storytelling. But
what is interesting for us isn't the application, but the definition of "The American Dream",
a definition without the slightest mention of faith. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address focusses on the same
subject, with an even greater tragedy to explain than the 2004 election.
How does Lincoln
define the subject?
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who died here
that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense,
we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men,
living and dead who struggled here have hallowed it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here.
It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--
that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here
gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom,
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
What is the difference between these two views of the American dream? TNR views it as a
myth, a story, a narrative that us poor unenlightened masses swallowed with our mother's milk,
and cannot escape from its rigid interpretation of our life's meaning, which, by implication,
they have been liberated from by the appropriate college education. Lincoln doesn't just retell
the Declaration principle, he believes it. Further, he says that these men who fell at Gettysburg, blue and gray,
believed it enough to die for it. And finally, he calls the cemetery where they lay, a "hallowed ground",
because this ultimate test of faith is honored by God.
Would TNR die for their story? Would the academe sacrifice their careers to
maintain their myth (that Liberty is a plotline)? Whose myth is the more True?
On Life
Talk about a roller-coaster ride!
Now the federal government got into the act to rein in
the Florida Supreme Court. I need not remind you that this isn't the first time the Florida
Supreme Court has required reining in. The irony of having State government overruled
by the Federal in favor of life should not be lost on Declaration Alliance. Perhaps we should invoke
the "three strikes and you're out" rule for judges!
What about the reasoning concerning Terri's wishes? If she never wished to live
the life of a semi-vegetable, should her husband be allowed to pull the plug? Is there
a right to death?
Well, we are not the first to point out that "right to death" and "right to life" are
mutually exclusive. Why? Because neither Terri nor the unborn can talk. So which right
takes precedence?
But supposing that we're talking about a Kevorkian convert, an adult who can enunciate
perfectly fine. Should they be given a "right to die"? After all, if life is such a
delicate and precious thing, how can we keep anyone from throwing it away? And what would
be the cost of stigmatizing an already difficult situation?
Everything in the world.
G.K. Chesterton, writing the defense of his faith in 1911, argued that what attracted
him to an anti-materialist faith was precisely this dilemma about suicide. Other biographers
talk about his morose teenage years, so evidently the issue was a very near and dear one
to GK. What he says about suicide is so eloquent, so thought provoking that I cannot summarize
the arguments without doing injustice to the poetry. Read
Orthodoxy
yourself, the third chapter.
He begins by noting that Terri's husband is entirely correct if life is nothing but
material. If we all return to dust, and the brain patterns which define us uniquely all
flatline in death, then there is nothing separating the suicide from the martyr. Yet everything
inside us rages at the injustice of the suicide bomber who blows herself up at a Bar Mitzvah,
and is idolized in the terrorist press as a "martyr of the faith". "How can this be noble? How
can this have martyrdom meaning?" we ask, as the yellow-suited cleanup crew hose the bits of human flesh from
the walls. A materialist must answer, "They are the same."
Terri Schiavo forces us to the same debating table. Either there is a God-given right to life,
or we are nothing but potentially useful bits of brain energy still connected to
a physical machine. Which is it?
No, we can't nuance this one away. There is no debate that Terri is included in the Declaration's "all men".
There really should be no debate about conflicting claims to Liberty and Life. One is the prerequisite of
the other. Just as there can be no Liberty without Life, there can be no Pursuit without Liberty and Life.
Jefferson put it in that order because they are logically related, depending on the antecedent.
Why can't there be a "right to death", since even Jefferson believed in the death penalty? Well,
it wouldn't be a penalty if it
were also a right. It is precisely a penalty because it overrules a right. But more exactly, a right is
not a want; it is not something put to a vote, and it is decidedly not democratic. It is a right because
it is based on something outside us, outside Congress, outside world opinion. As we argued before,
it is something God-given. Only God can give life, though any of us can take it away.
And taking can never be a right.
What about all those messy cases, like Terri's, where Alzheimer's or stroke or cancer take away the joy
of living? Should we penalize these suffering people by denying them the opportunity to die?
In a word, yes.
Life is messy. No one who raises a child can claim otherwise. Is it so surprising that the end of
life should be any less messy than the beginning? Yes, there are tragedies. Yes, they are painful. But
in suffering together, in solidarity with life there is also victory. For we say to Death, "you cannot
defeat us", and to the Darkness "you cannot overwhelm us". We say to Materialism, "there is meaning
beyond brain waves", and to
Peter Singer, "sacrament trumps utility". To misquote Benjamin Franklin,
"He who would give up his life for the pursuit of happiness deserved (and accepted) neither."
At the end of life, just as it is at the beginning, Life is Sacred.
On Abortion
I am astounded, almost speechless. Just as President Bush's prediction that a free Iraq
would change the Middle East was truer than believed, so also the Declaration's stance on
Abortion is proving eerily prescient. In England, Joanna Jepson appealed
the use of an English abortion law to justify the abortion of a child with hare-lip, in
clear violation of the intent of the law. The Chief Prosecuter in the case, found himself
excusing the doctors for "good faith", which now, evidently, applies to murder. What makes the
case so poignant, is that Joanna was also born with hare-lip, long since corrected by surgery.
Britain is all astir, so much so that the Archbishop of Canterbury has weighed in with a
vague sermon.
This is not surprising given his statements concerning his far greater predicament, holding together the world-wide Anglican
Communion despite the in-your-face innovations of the US and Canada. Nevertheless, it signals
that Abortion, that peculiarly "American" issue, has suddenly made it to the radar screen of
sophisticated British MP's and their state church. Who knows, this may be the European spring, could France be next?