marchand chronicles

Ben Stein & Rachel Lucas Beat The Crap Out Of Me

Another Profanity Warning

Apparently, instead of writing that last post, I could have saved myself a lot of time and just linked to this brief essay by Ben Stein:

Here is what makes me furious about the Terri Schiavo case, short and sweet.

The courts of the United States can find a right for the abortion industry to take a fully formed, totally healthy baby at nine months' term, out of his mother's womb and murder it by putting scissors through his brain and grinding them about.

They do this without one single word of support from any Congressional act of any kind ever.

They can find a right of savage murderers of innocent women who drown them for a lark to avoid the death penalty because they are old enough to drive and to kill but supposedly too young to be executed. Again, there is not one syllable in any Congressional act that sanctions this protection of the guilty.

But with the Congress and the President of the United States pleading for the life of a woman who is not brain dead, who responds to words and to touch, who is not on life support, whose parents beg for her to be kept alive, whose nurses give affidavits that she can be rehabilitated, with a specific law commanding the courts to review the case to keep this poor soul alive, the courts instead find no rights for her.

But Stein's fury is nothing compared to Rachel Lucas:

But as I have now repeatedly and loudly told my husband (and have written down): for the love of anything that ever was good or decent on this planet, DON'T FREAKIN' STARVE ME TO DEATH. Mmkay? How about a nice big syringe full of morphine and then something to make my heart stop. Thanks, that'd be super. Even if I look like a giant blue-eyed slab of vegetable matter, am drooling, and the scans show that all I have is a brain stem while the rest of my gray matter has evaporated. I'm not afraid of dying, just don't kill me slow.

Not too much to ask.

Meanwhile, I'll try to go about my life with the knowledge that at least half of my fellow Americans are barbaric, heartless, selfish assholes who couldn't care less about a woman starving slowly to death in a hospice bed in Florida. The fact that she is dying is really not the problem - she "died" long ago, according to pretty much everybody. Who has custody of her is not the problem - I read the Wolfson report and it turns out her parents are kinda nuts and Michael is not necessarily an evil asshole.

The problem, and it is a very very big fucking problem, is that no one seems to give a rat's ass that it is acceptable to kill a human being, one who just might have some shred of conscious awareness, by withholding water and food.

It's absolutely disgusting. It's like she's a forsaken fern or something - just stop watering her until she dies. Sure, it'll look ugly for a while but it's just a fern/brain-dead woman. It can't feel anything. Dry up and die.

God bless America, the most civilized and humane society ever to exist. Shit.

As Ben might say: I'm humbled. Get out of here.

posted by Marsh @ 3:40 PM