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Terri Schiavo, Terrorists and George W. Bush

The writer contends that this "sinister parody" of a debate has done nothing to help Schiavo, but has exposed something of a terrorist tendency in America's fundamentalist Christian community.

Mar. 24, 2005

By Pierre Marcelle

Original Article (French)    

Who will have won, when the Terri Schiavo affair is over?

A Court of Appeal yesterday confirmed the decision of Judge Whittemore (see Libération of March 23) prohibiting the reinsertion of a feeding tube, which nourished a comatose body for fifteen years and a complicated weeklong debate. Does democracy "win" when it focuses on "the intrusion of politics into a private life?"

Regardless of each person's personal opinion in this affair, the legal conclusion of the case will at least have the merit of ending this sinister parody of a debate, which saw President W. using this vegetative body (a vegetable, yes ...) with unparalleled cynicism, culminating in the posturing of his return from his (sacred) weekend [on his Texas ranch], to sign a law hastily voted on, and meant to "save the life" of Terri Schiavo.

The problem with George W. Bush is that we don't really know whether he is a president who decides or a puppet that is manipulated. But we cannot exclude the possibility that he has become a decision-making puppet, being used by others as much as deciding on his own, in showing his concern for life that, since his crusade in Iraq, has marked his actions and his conscience.

In the rigidity of his actions and the fixedness of his gaze on the lawn of the White House the other day, one could almost imagine a reappearance of the ghosts that shook him on a particular September 11.

And considering what is going on in background, there is good reason for him to be shaken: The people who are camping under the walls of a clinic in Pinellas Park [Florida], are terrorists. The same people who, in the name of the right to life, care as little as Bush does about the life of Terri Schiavo, and yell "murder" in the name of their "sacred" fundamentalist Christian values.

Matching the cruelty of their language with their convictions, they wave signs equating abortion and euthanasia with "Auschwitz." The cruelty of so glibly invoking Auschwitz, and conflating euthanasia and abortion, is of a nature that, in trivializing Auschwitz, perpetuates Auschwitz.


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