Terri Shiavo is Dead—Time to Stop Bickering About It

Posted September 28, 2004, 2:47 p.m.

I am tired of this story.

Terri Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state for fourteen years. She is not going to wake up and be okay again. Since she apparently left no living will, her husband—as legal authority on the matter—has the right to decide that medical science cannot help her, and he has the right to demand that her feeding tube be removed.

Michael is legally married to a woman who has been effectively dead for fourteen years. He has the right to put her out of her misery, and he has the right to decide that it is time for him to be able to bury the woman he loves and move on with his life as best as he can.

I understand that Terri’s parents don’t want their daughter to ‘die’ in the physical sense, but it is not their call and should not be their call. They want their daughter back, but their daughter is not coming back—no matter how long medical science can keep her body alive.

Michael Schiavo has every right to say that enough is enough, and neither Terri’s parents nor the state of Florida has the legal power—or moral authority—to say otherwise. This constant legal battle perpetrated by Terri’s parents lacks common sense, and does nothing but put them and Michael through more unneccesary pain. Terri Schiavo is dead. It is time to grieve, mourn, and move on.

Schiavo’s parents battle for guardianship (CNN.com).

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.

Don’t worry too much about what the world calls victories or defeats. How often the ‘victor’ ends up defeated!

A great memory does not make a philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called grammar.

In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

We’re faced with problems that are caused by the fact that science—or that which passes for science today—is often neither accurate nor reliable.

The more I see the better satisfied I am that I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.

The passions are not evil but they are stupid. They need a teacher.

There was far more courage to the square mile in the Middle Ages, when no king had a standing army, but every man had a bow or sword.

From the very beginning in the womb of a woman, until the very last moment when a person’s breath speaks of his or her presence in the world, this life is human, even if it develops into an immense array of conditions of weakness [and] suffering. . . .

An act of love always tends towards two things; to the good that one wills, and to the person for whom one wills it.

People enjoy helping when they can, it is part of human nature. But when people are forced to pay heavy taxes to finance entitlement programs, food stamps, and welfare, they hate it.

If your character and that of those around you were soft and sweet like marshmallows, you would never become a saint.

If all values are only subjective, so is the value of tolerance.

That’s one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.

And it is a fact that books which fall short of greatness sometimes have a power to move us greatly, especially in childhood when we are least critical and most forgiving, for their very failures confess their humanity.

It is my belief that there are ‘absolutes’ in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what the words meant and meant their prohibitions to be ‘absolutes.’

The transient passions and the interests of an hour, or the chance of circumstances, may have created the external forms of independence; but the despotic tendency which has been repelled will, sooner or later, inevitably reappear on the surface.

Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

You could compile . . . the worst book in the world entirely out of . . . passages from the best writers in the world.

There can be only one true religion, because a thing cannot be false and true at the same time, and, therefore, all religions that contradict the teaching of the true Church must teach falsehood.