Choose Life

Michelle Malkin is all over the Terri Schiavo case (UPDATE I: with more here as of early Monday morning). She references - among other things - this excellent thought piece by Andrew McCarthy at NRO. McCarthy points out how inconsistent it is to rail against torture for terrorists, while promoting worse when the victim is innocent - and inconvenient. Peggy Noonan's Friday piece in the Wall Street Journal carries forward philosophical koans from Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan in an equally strong argument for life. How ironic (but hardly coincidental) that this should transpire as Holy Week begins, amidst Lenten fasting and passion play reminders of another crowd 2000 years ago and its deliberate condemnation of an innocent. Will we pass the test this time?

UPDATE II: I awoke this (Monday) morning thinking about how Michael Schiavo's push to legally kill his wife, Terri differs from Scott Peterson's premeditated killing of his wife, Laci. Other than the 'legally' part, I couldn't think of any substantive differences. Each man was having sex with another woman when he killed his wife. Each man - it can be surmised - found the financial burdens of their marriage inconvenient. Sounds like domestic abuse to me. But is the National Organization for Women stepping up here? Not a chance. (I searched their site; check out the link.) Are we surprised? This is the same women's organization whose concerns stopped at our borders when the Taliban was crushing women in Afghanistan. I especially liked this take in the Manchester Union Leader yesterday:

Why not just shoot her? For that matter, why not stab her, slit her throat, or suffocate her with a pillow? What’s the difference? She’ll be no less dead if her husband does any of those things than if she starves to death after he removes her feeding tube. But there is a difference, isn’t there? Shooting leaves such a mess. So do stabbing and slashing. And we’ve all seen those movies where some poor victim grasps at the pillow or telephone cord in a vain struggle for one last breath before everything goes dark. Too gruesome. But starving her to death, now there’s the ticket. Nothing to clean up, no tense struggle... Terri Schiavo might be a woman, and a disabled person, but she is one the so-called women’s and civil rights movements are perfectly willing to sacrifice on the altar of “choice.”

UPDATE III: In light of Terri's innocence, her husband's stubbornness in wanting to see her die, and the timing of this whole drama over Palm Sunday weekend, I couldn't help but reflect on the rest of the passage I cited yesterday. From Matthew 10:35-37:

[Jesus said] ...I have come to turn
‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law
a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.’
Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me...

UPDATE IV: I found this NOW press release particularly ironic. What's changed in four years? Is Terri not 'disabled'? Are her civil rights not being violated?