Sam Says Please, why Terri Schiavo?

Author: Sam Wilson

The Terri Schiavo case is a sad one. Sad for everyone involved. Her husband, her family and she in particular all deserve sympathy and compassion. I cannot, and do not want to imagine what such a situation must be like to live through.

Though, there is something that interests me about what has happened in Florida over the past few weeks, and that is how President Bush and the GOP controlled Congress have reacted to all this. In an emergency session of Congress, lawmakers passed a bill to allow Mrs. Schiavo's parents to petition a federal judge to reinstate her feeding tube. President Bush then signed the bill in the middle of the night in the White House residence. They sure made the politics of this cinematic, didn't they?

What interests me about this is the nagging question of "why?" To the best of my understanding, Congress did not have the authority to override state courts and legal guardian decisions. And, on March 15 doctors in Texas removed the breathing tube that kept a six-month-old baby alive against his mother's wishes. Why did the president and Congress rush to save Mrs. Schiavo and not a six-month-old infant? By the way, the law that allowed the doctors to go over the mother's wishes was signed into effect by the then-Governor George W. Bush.

The answer to this irritating "why" question is that it became a media circus with which the religious right fell in love. And the GOP, especially President Bush, has an odd relationship with the religious right.

To keep his alliance of pro-business types and religious conservatives together the president has to walk a delicate line. The pro-market types are the easier to placate. They generally want things like tax cuts, which sells easily to the general public.

The religious conservatives want stuff like actually overturning Roe, removing evolution from high school text books and making sure a gay couple, in only two of 50 states, does not get the same legal rights as straight couples do everywhere. All that is a bit harder to sell to the moderate public.

So what does the president do to keep this coalition together? Give the business folks what they want and pay lip service to the religious right. Remember last summer and the whole "protecting the sanctity of marriage" constitutional amendment thing? That was pure malarkey - it's certainly not a priority now.

But the religious right is not blind. Social Security privatization is not an issue that gets the religious right fired up and not too many other of the president's other priorities are either, judges excepted. So, to keep the religious right from realizing they have basically been lied to, Terri Schiavo's parents get an emergency session of Congress, while the boy in Texas gets only one article on a Lexis search.

So, really, it starts to seem that the GOP is playing politics with a human life and a family that has been shattered. And that is disgusting.