Wednesday, March 23, 2005
A little scary
Apparently heresay is acceptable for the removal of someone's medical support . . .
[One of the court opinions that has called for an end to Schiavo's life] bases the decision to cease feeding Schiavo on comments that she reportedly made in passing at a funeral, and to her husband after watching a TV movie. Under Florida law, this may well be the correct decision . . . but if so, then I think Florida law ought to be changed [ellipsis in original]. I would be very, very upset if I went into a vegetative state, and decisions about the disposition of my life were made based on some random, undocumented comments I'd made to my spouse after watching a movie about comas.
I want to focus in on Douthat's use of the term “Florida law.” He seems to be saying, “under Florida law, this flies, but State Senator Douthat would seek to change that law, and then Florida would be better off.” K-Lo, McCarthy, Sean Hannity have all made similar mistakes.
To my friends on the right:
THIS HAPPENS EVERY YEAR HUNDREDS OF TIMES A YEAR IN EVERY STATE IN THE UNION! This is not a problem in Florida law alone. Nancy Cruzan (a citizen of Missouri) had her feeding tube removed because of comments she made to her friends during a T.V. movie, Marjorie Nightbert (who was also in Florida) wasn't even allowed to eat by mouth (she could still do that), because her brother said that the, er, “real” her (the intelligent her that existed, and that he knew so very well, before her brain-damaging accident) would want to starve rather than live on the way she was living. He was believed by the judge, and he did not pove it with anything better than hearsay (if he even had that).
My mother and I could have ordered the doctors at Mt. Sinai last year to take out my grandfather's feeding tube at any time we wanted. No one would have asked us, “Well, what did he talk to you about after watching movies on dying?” If there was no argument between family members in this particular famous case (as there is between the Schindlers and Michael Schiavo), you wouldn’t even have gotten the level of evidence that you have had in this sad case.
Weird hypo: If I had sued my mother to stop her from removing her father's feeding tube, all the evidence that New York State courts would have asked for would have been this highly dubious hearsay. They wouldn’t have expected more. So if there is a controversy, then we get up to the ridiculously low standard of evidence here that (rightly) scares Douthat. That is true here in New York, and that is true everywhere.
Douthat saying that Florida should change its law is a little like Douthat saying that in Florida 1st degree murder shouldn't require pre-meditation. Mr. Douthat: If Florida did do that it would stick out like the sorest of sore thumbs. You've got to understand that there is nowhere in this whole nation where you can go where hearsay won't be used to adjudicate a controversy over your if you were to become severely cognitively disabled and there was a controversy over letting you have a feeding tube or starving you to death. Nowhere.
Conservatives who do this, without knowing it, are insulting all the 100's of people who have been starved to death over the last 20 years in this nation by making it seam like Terri Schiavo is rare. Tom Delay (and I know his heart is in the right place) says things to the effect of “Congress won't let this poor woman die.”
Mr. Delay, Congress has let these kinda people die all the time, and it has done so repeatedly since you've been Whip and Majority Leader.
In trying to “save Terri”, I fear many Sean Hannity listeners, and Fox watchers, and many others, have been led to believe that the Republican Party and conservative movement came to the aid of an endangered woman, who's afflictions were just so shocking and so out of the ordinary, that they just had to do something.
No, what is really happening here is like a few decent, well-armed, but really ignorant, Germans coming up to the last car on a train going to a death camp in 1944, stopping the train by aiming their guns at the Nazi conductor, plucking one Jew out of that one last car, that happens to have only one person in it-while the rest have thousands, and saying: “My God! Our government was going to kill you! Just for being Jewish! I can't believe it! It's an outrage! Well, I say I will introduce a law in the Reichstag tomorrow, just about you, saying that this can't happen again to you and only you (because I don't see any other Jews in this car)! Conductor: Since I am sure the rest of this stuff in all these other cars is merely guns and ammo to help our German Army fight the Russians and keep Communism out of Eastern Europe, I will let you go on to that little Polish camp you were going to without shooting you! But you'd better be nice to this one Jewish man in the future, got that?! Good!”
It is shocking how naive the conservatives in this country are in fighting the culture of death. We need to be doing much more, much faster. To end the way Michael Ledeen does:
Faster, please.
[One of the court opinions that has called for an end to Schiavo's life] bases the decision to cease feeding Schiavo on comments that she reportedly made in passing at a funeral, and to her husband after watching a TV movie. Under Florida law, this may well be the correct decision . . . but if so, then I think Florida law ought to be changed [ellipsis in original]. I would be very, very upset if I went into a vegetative state, and decisions about the disposition of my life were made based on some random, undocumented comments I'd made to my spouse after watching a movie about comas.
I want to focus in on Douthat's use of the term “Florida law.” He seems to be saying, “under Florida law, this flies, but State Senator Douthat would seek to change that law, and then Florida would be better off.” K-Lo, McCarthy, Sean Hannity have all made similar mistakes.
To my friends on the right:
THIS HAPPENS EVERY YEAR HUNDREDS OF TIMES A YEAR IN EVERY STATE IN THE UNION! This is not a problem in Florida law alone. Nancy Cruzan (a citizen of Missouri) had her feeding tube removed because of comments she made to her friends during a T.V. movie, Marjorie Nightbert (who was also in Florida) wasn't even allowed to eat by mouth (she could still do that), because her brother said that the, er, “real” her (the intelligent her that existed, and that he knew so very well, before her brain-damaging accident) would want to starve rather than live on the way she was living. He was believed by the judge, and he did not pove it with anything better than hearsay (if he even had that).
My mother and I could have ordered the doctors at Mt. Sinai last year to take out my grandfather's feeding tube at any time we wanted. No one would have asked us, “Well, what did he talk to you about after watching movies on dying?” If there was no argument between family members in this particular famous case (as there is between the Schindlers and Michael Schiavo), you wouldn’t even have gotten the level of evidence that you have had in this sad case.
Weird hypo: If I had sued my mother to stop her from removing her father's feeding tube, all the evidence that New York State courts would have asked for would have been this highly dubious hearsay. They wouldn’t have expected more. So if there is a controversy, then we get up to the ridiculously low standard of evidence here that (rightly) scares Douthat. That is true here in New York, and that is true everywhere.
Douthat saying that Florida should change its law is a little like Douthat saying that in Florida 1st degree murder shouldn't require pre-meditation. Mr. Douthat: If Florida did do that it would stick out like the sorest of sore thumbs. You've got to understand that there is nowhere in this whole nation where you can go where hearsay won't be used to adjudicate a controversy over your if you were to become severely cognitively disabled and there was a controversy over letting you have a feeding tube or starving you to death. Nowhere.
Conservatives who do this, without knowing it, are insulting all the 100's of people who have been starved to death over the last 20 years in this nation by making it seam like Terri Schiavo is rare. Tom Delay (and I know his heart is in the right place) says things to the effect of “Congress won't let this poor woman die.”
Mr. Delay, Congress has let these kinda people die all the time, and it has done so repeatedly since you've been Whip and Majority Leader.
In trying to “save Terri”, I fear many Sean Hannity listeners, and Fox watchers, and many others, have been led to believe that the Republican Party and conservative movement came to the aid of an endangered woman, who's afflictions were just so shocking and so out of the ordinary, that they just had to do something.
No, what is really happening here is like a few decent, well-armed, but really ignorant, Germans coming up to the last car on a train going to a death camp in 1944, stopping the train by aiming their guns at the Nazi conductor, plucking one Jew out of that one last car, that happens to have only one person in it-while the rest have thousands, and saying: “My God! Our government was going to kill you! Just for being Jewish! I can't believe it! It's an outrage! Well, I say I will introduce a law in the Reichstag tomorrow, just about you, saying that this can't happen again to you and only you (because I don't see any other Jews in this car)! Conductor: Since I am sure the rest of this stuff in all these other cars is merely guns and ammo to help our German Army fight the Russians and keep Communism out of Eastern Europe, I will let you go on to that little Polish camp you were going to without shooting you! But you'd better be nice to this one Jewish man in the future, got that?! Good!”
It is shocking how naive the conservatives in this country are in fighting the culture of death. We need to be doing much more, much faster. To end the way Michael Ledeen does:
Faster, please.
