If I were to put my delightful cat Doobie in our traveling cage and stop feeding him until the meowing and crying ended and he finally died, I would be guilty of a Class 6 felony in Virginia. Under the law, I would be eligible for “a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than five years… and a fine of not more than ,500, either or both.” Yet in Florida Michael Schiavo— who years ago abandoned his marital vows along with his disabled wife and now lives with and has had two children with his girlfriend—found a judge whom he convinced that his late wife Terri wouldn’t have wanted to live in the disabled state she was in. Somehow this judge was convinced by ‘clear and convincing evidence,’ the highest level of civil proof—in spite of the fact that Terri never wrote a living will nor left any evidence of advanced directives. And in spite of parents who wanted to care for her, and believed Terri would never have wanted to die like she did, this same judge ordered the removal of her feeding tube—relegating Terri to a slow, torturous, two-week long death by dehydration and starvation. But wait! Florida has a law that should have applied to this case (but, of course, wasn’t).
It is aptly named the “Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation of Elderly Persons and Disabled Adults” Act (see Florida Penal Code, Sect. 825.102). Under it, it’s a serious felony to cause the “[a]ggravated abuse of [a]… disabled adult” by, among other things, “[w]illfull tortur[e].” It is also a felony if one responsible for an incapacitated adult “willfully or by culpable negligence neglects [a]…disabled adult” or fails “to provide [a]…disabled adult with the care, supervision, and services necessary to maintain the… disabled adult’s physical and mental health, including, but not limited to, food, nutrition…” Now that Terri is dead, any applications of law or nonviolent moral action on her behalf are moot. Yet her legacy is such that the Church should be energized to fight for a culture of life to prevail over the culture of death like never before.
(The term “a culture of life” was one the late Pope John Paul II introduced to the world’s lexicon during his amazing 26-year papacy. He will be sorely missed by both Catholics and Protestants worldwide. His life and life ethic are memorialized in our next issue of CCT.) For either a culture of life and its attendant law will prevail, or one that would send me to prison for killing my cat, while protecting Michael for killing his wife. Tragically, I think it is really unclear, at this moment in America, which one it will be, as no one stood up for Terri at the end—everyone failed her and left her to die. For many secularists, our cherished constitutional history of the right to life and freedom of religion has morphed into a dedicated effort at building a civic life that is characterized by the freedom from religion and the culture of life. Hostility toward life and religion—and toward Christianity in particular—has grown into a multifaceted cause that is scrubbing away all reference to God and reliance on faith-based actions in the public square.
Taking the dubious doctrine of separation of church and state to absolute ends, militant secularists have used speech codes (on many of our best college campuses), extremist analogies (comparing George Bush to Hitler), litigation and radical jurists (Roe v. Wade and the Massachusetts case for gay marriage, among a myriad other cases), and threats and violence (the quasi-terrorist antics of Act-Up against the Church) to promote its cause and deny any influence of faith-based policy in the public forums of our nation. This secular hostility has also played itself out in psychotherapy and mental health care—in what has been generously described as “the faith gap.” Compared to 85% of the populace who claim to believe in God, with as many as two-thirds or more believing in Christian faith and values, those numbers are nearly reversed when mental health professionals are queried about their beliefs in God—the great majority don’t. No doubt one reason a great many conservative
Tags: Advanced Directives, Clear And Convincing Evidence, Code Sect, Culpable Negligence, Culture, Death, Death By Dehydration, Death By Dehydration And Starvation, Disab, Doobie, Elderly Persons, Hellip, It's, join, Mdash, Michael Schiavo, Militant, More Than Five Years, Penal Code, Resistance, Rsquo, Secularism, SUMMER, Time, Tortur, Torturous, Tube Amp, Wife Terri
