[lbo-talk] Ambivalence on Schiavo

snitsnat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Wed Mar 30 09:18:24 PST 2005


At 11:46 AM 3/30/2005, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>Tully:
> > Religion is hardly rational, yet allowances for it are made all the
> > time. Why wasn't an allowance made here, especially if family's
> > beliefs compel them to live in fear for Terri's soul based on the
> > actions taken by the state? Why should any state have any right to
> > put its citizenry (the survivors) in such pain? Wasn't gov't created
> > to help protect its citizens against such persecution?
>
>The problem with that reasoning is that it discriminates against people
>whose physical condition incapacitates them to take actions affecting their
>lives. I am a rather healthy person, but if I decide that I've had it, I
>can off myself by a number means, from guns shot to hanging myself to
>jumping out of a window to cutting my wrists and to poisoning myself. I can
>do that regardless of what my significant others may think of it, regardless
>of how the army of priests and moralists view it, and regardless of what the
>law in all its majesty says about suicide. The only thing that matters is
>that I can and I am willing to do it - and if I do it, nothing else - gods,
>laws, morals, or any other mumbo jumbo - matters.
>
>If I become physically incapacitated, however, the right to take my own life
>suddenly becomes subject to approval by priests, parents, doctors, judges,
>politicos and kindred bigger than life characters. In that situation, I can
>terminate my life only when these clowns -who otherwise would not matter -
>approve of it. That is discriminatory.
>
>Therefore, the proper role of the state is to assure that the person's will
>is honored regardless of his/her physical condition. If there is doubt, I
>would rather err on the side on honoring the person's rights to have his/her
>will honored rather than trampling it. You would not advocate questioning
>an incapacitated person's other rights, say property rights, by subjecting
>it to inquisition by doctors, parents, priests, moralists and politicos,
>would you?

The whole question is ridiculous. Schiavo had the right to do what he wanted to do in the first place. He simply could have made the decision years ago, without ASKING the court's to decide. HAd he taken those steps, the parents would have filed their injuctions and so forth. It would have ended up in court any way you look at.

Schiave, himself, ASKED the court to make the decision. We don't know why, but if I had my father-in-law tell all of PIEnellas county that I was a good-for-nothing adulturer (after Schindler encouraged his son-in-law to date and even met the new girlfriends) and greedy som'bitch (after Schindler got yanked about the settlement money not bailing him out of his economic hardship. Made a bad investment buddy. Deal, like a big boy), I'd sure go to the courts because the Schindlers were going to turn it over to the state anyway had Schiavo exercised his legal frickin' rights.

If these people want to go by religious views, then they ought to stick by their religious views. Isn't the husband the person who decides on their religious view? Isn't their religious view that women are subordinate to, first their father, and then to their husband once married?

And, as for the parent-child relationship being indelible. Please. It's not. It can be severed through the law just as marriage is created/severed by the law. The parent/child relationship is _defined by_ the state from the get go.

It is also shaped (not determined) by society, the social structure within which we live. The practices that tell us what's right and wrong. There's nothing indelible about it in the sense that parental-child feelings would naturally emerge in some state of nature outside of the sway of the social.

Perhaps Miles and the anthropologists can speak to this more, but if we were another culture, the notion that there's some indelible relationship there doesn't hold. Groups that are 'closer' to a state of nature than we are don't evidence the same sentimental bond between parent/child we, in the West, do. Hell, in our own history, it wasn't unusual to sell babies. It actually took political effort and a small social movement to bring adoption to the fore by making a child's life "priceless" instead of something that could have a price put on it.

Wealthy mothers in France though nothing of never seeing their infant for the first three years, shipping them off to the countryside to be breastfeed by a peasant woman who often took in several infants whom she breastfed and fed pablum before they were really ready to digest it. Many of them died from those practices. No one thought wealthy women had some sentimental indelible attachment to her child such that it would preclude her from shipping it off, not to be s seen for three years!

In the colonial era, the local level, the town fathers in a community decided what to do with a child if they felt the parents weren't sufficiently disciplining the kid. They'd pull 'em out of the home faster the Child Protective Services and put him to work in a workhouse or as an apprentice to a craftsman working for some wealthy family. Maybe just because said wealthy family had a grudge or needed an extra hand around their estate. So much for local control being, somehow, more egalitarian. Foo.

Geez. I guess I'm going to have to get out _Domestic REvolutions_ so I can also look up that law about forcing men that committed bestiality to watch while the animal was hung -- because that was considered fitting punishment.

hmmmmmmmmm.

"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."

--Bruce Sterling



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list