Some very bad news in the Terri Schindler-Schiavo situation. It appears that Judge Baird, acting in a manner consistent with his previous rulings concerning Terri’s case, has ruled Terri’s Law unconstitutional. Here’s a sample of Fr. Rob Johansen’s appropriately biting commentary:
What this ruling is really all about is apparent further on, where Judge Baird once again rules that Governor Bush may not introduce new testimony or new evidence in this case. Above all, Baird does not want his and Judge Greer’s dubious deliberations subjected to impartial scrutiny. They do not want the evidence that Greer ignored in previous hearings, and advances in the understanding and treatment of brain-injured patients, to come out into the light of day. They do not want another court to consider facts such as the 43% error rate in diagnosing PVS patients. Because if they were, it might become apparent that they are wrong, and have been culpably wrong all along.
This case is, at the legal level, about more (and less) than Terri Schiavo. It is about judges protecting their power to decide who may live and who may die. They will do almost anything to protect that power.
And if the price of protecting their god-like power is Terri Schiavo’s life, that’s a price they’re willing to pay.
Being both a judge myself, albeit in the canonical rather than the civil realm, and the son of a judge, I wish I could disagree with Fr. Rob. But I cannot. I fear Fr. Rob is right and Terri is about to become the next life sacrificed on the altar of judicial activism. Please keep Terri and her family in prayer, and please pray for judges everywhere.
I wish I could disagree with Fr. Johansen too, Pete. But the judiciary in the US has usurped–with the public’s tacit consent–the right to autonomously determine who’s human and who’s not. Justice Kennedy was really saying in the Casey decision that it’s *his* Nietzschean view of “the mystery of life and the universe” which should have authority over which vulnerable, innocent people live, and which are killed.
Such are the Faustian bargains of the sexual revolution: we seize sexual autonomy, and let the judiciary do the on-paper work of rationalization so we don’t actually have to democratically approve the evil directly ourselves.
Will Bishop Lynch of St. Petersburg-Tampa order his priests not to preach about Terri Schiavo’s plight again, the way he did at the time Terri’s Law was passed?
It’s time for the federal government to intervene under the 14th amendment. I believe there are statutes in effect that specifically protect the disabled.