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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
There are important issues at stake here, issues that run far deeper than the easy question of, is she truly as brain-dead as Dean? My original input, consisting of passing on info I gained in about five minutes of Google, was aimed at counteracting five or six rather vituperative posts that made it seem as if there were no issue beyond "smart people v. idiots." I can understand why people might like to present things this way, but it's been my experience that there are usually other viewpoints about an issue than just the one presented here.

This is obviously tied in to the abortion debate, and so the sides are the same as in that one. I can only say at this point:

1. If I'm ever in the state she's in, unplug me. I'll make it possible by signing the right stuff in advance. Would that she had done so. But, if my family would somehow derive strength, or hope, or joy by keeping me plugged in, fine. Like I'd know about it, anyway.

2. In the absence of that step, I am amazed - befuddled - by learning, once again, that the fastest way to be demonized here and in our society is to interfere with people's perception of their right (right?) to kill those whom they deem it correct to kill. Nothing divides our society as violently. The people here who come out stridently in defense of their moral certainty of the correctness of killing certain groups of other people - people who are, in other respects, generally thoughtful, gentle-seeming people - well, their resoluteness and drive on the issue are scary.

3. If TS truly is an amoeba - if there's nothing there - and this is a necessary precondition to those calling stridently for her death - what's the harm in humoring her parents, and just handing her over to them, at their expense? Someone here said "dignity", but I suspect they meant their own, as I can't see how killing a life can give that life dignity, while I can see how it might make it easier to argue that such a life is undeserving. Once they're dead, how much defense can they deserve, after all?

4. A strong urge to fight allowing her parents to simply take her away is morbid, and bespeaks either an intensely strong ego that cannot let someone else have their way, or an intensely weak ego that couldn't stand for not getting their own. Why not just stay out of it, and let a parent who is concerned and maybe hopeful do what they can? In the face of a choice of "let her live, on our dime", and "kill her now - I'm sure that's what she wants", why would we ever not simply err on the side of not killing someone? And why do otherwise reasonable people feel so strongly the other way?

I truly don't get this one. Not Bob wants her dead. Ty wants her dead. RT wants her dead. They ridicule people who don't. From where do they derive a moral sanction to make and impose this judgment? Is it merely consistent with their longstanding fight in favor of capital punishment?

I don't want her dead. But I feel for her husband. If, God forbid, my wife were to be in that state, it would be a nightmare to be stuck in litigation with them for years and years. (It's bad enough when they drink my wine.) I sympathize with her parents. But we have ways of resolving these conflicts, ways which the Schiavos and the GOP are seeking to overrule.