Judge George Greer has ruled that the feeding tube nourishing Terri Schiavo must be removed and she must be allowed to starve to death. Imagine for one moment that authorities ruled that food must be withheld from someone on death row, or from a suspected al Qaida detainee, until the prisoner starved to death. The left would be incandescent with rage. They would be screaming about the cruelty and inhumanity of the ruling. They would be shouting at the tops of their formidable lungs about egregious violations of human rights and the Geneva accords. Calls would go out from every organ of liberalism demanding the ouster or impeachment of every and any official who could be tied to this reprehensible decision.
But in the case of a completely innocent woman who is neither a criminal nor a terrorist, the Left is almost preternaturally silent. They seem perfectly content to let Terri Schiavo be killed through a long slow process of starvation and dehydration. Even worse, some democrats are allegedly attempting to exploit the tragedy of this woman and her family by turning it to partisan political advantage.
Rush Limbaugh said today that an editorial in a national newspaper (I missed the name of the paper) asserted that we are not actually killing Ms Schiavo by removing her feeding tube, we're simply allowing nature to take its course by not forcing her to live. This statement, if I heard it correctly, is uncommonly dumb even by liberal standards. If a mother refuses to feed her infant would that editorialist argue that the mother wasn't really killing the child, but was rather simply letting nature take its course? Anyone who doesn't wish to care for either the very young or the elderly need only withhold food from them and let them die and they bear no guilt. Welcome to our Brave New World.
The next time you hear someone from the Left say that capital punishment is cruel and unusual punishment and should be abolished, or that torturing a suspected terrorist violates his human rights and demeans us as a nation, ask this person where he or she was when an American judge unilaterally sentenced Terri Schiavo to starve to death while her parents stood by legally helpless. Anyone who is indifferent to Ms Schiavo's plight and that of her family has no moral credibility on any other human rights issue.