Imagine that you took the time to write a living will spelling out in great detail under what circumstances you would like to be allowed to die. And imagine that you were sent to Iraq, hit by a roadside bomb, and suffered a terrible brain injury. And imagine that you lingered in a coma for nine months but never regained consciousness. And imagine that your family respected the wishes spelled out in your living will and removed your feeding tube. Finally, imagine some wingnuts having the gall to criticize your parents. That’s what happened to Marine Staff Sergeant Chad Simon, of Monona, Wisconsin:
He died nine months later, on Aug. 4, at a HospiceCare facility in Madison, after his family, following his wishes, disconnected his feeding tube. “He did have a living will, and it was very explicit. There was nothing to question,” said the Rev. Jeff Mannel, pastor at Madison Church of Christ, and a close family friend.
Jack Schuster, the family’s attorney, said Chad’s wife, Regina, made the decision after much soul-searching and with a judge’s approval.
While the family seemed to be at peace with carrying out Chad’s wishes, others who didn’t know the Marine weren’t happy with the family’s decision.
Pro-Life Wisconsin, which calls itself “your 100% pro-life voice,” accused HospiceCare of murder.
“Sgt. Simon was rendered handicapped by the bomb in Iraq; he was murdered by those who were in charge of his medical care,” the group’s press release declared.
The Shepherd Express
More about Pro-Life Wisconsin below the fold.
Pro-Life Wisconsin is a group that wields influence in the state Capitol and endorses candidates. Twenty-five members of the current Legislature were endorsed by Pro-Life Wisconsin last year. To get that endorsement, candidates had to agree to oppose abortion without exception—for rape or incest victims, or even to save a pregnant woman’s life.
They want to restrict birth control as well. And they want to interfere with a terminally ill patient’s right to die. They say they are “dedicated to defending innocent human life, without exception and without compromise.”
The anti-choice lobby in the Legislature, including Wisconsin Right-to-Life, has far more influence than it should, given the attitudes of the state’s voters.
Only one legislator, state Rep. Amy Sue Vruwink (D-Milladore), had the courage to criticize Pro-Life Wisconsin’s behavior. “Formulating and following through with [living will] directives is not murder. To suggest otherwise is misleading and shockingly disrespectful to those dealing with a tragic loss,” she said in a release. Everyone else was silent.
This is a group that thinks it wants publicity, but which would not thrive in the spotlight. Those who defend and support a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions and an individual’s right to make his or her own end-of-life choices would do well to highlight and publicize Pro-Life Wisconsin’s extremist views.
That could make an endorsement from such a group a liability in the future, and force candidates who accept their endorsements to defend their radical views. Ignoring them simply emboldens them; exposure could destroy them.
Why are we cursed with these people? Is there something in our water supply? Is it the hormones in our beef? Why do we have so many crazy people in our country?
It is my dearest hope that there is a special place for these people, in hell or elsewhere according to their beliefs.
I read about this story a few weeks back and it just made me sick. This is the reason I cannot stand, across the board, people pushing their “morality” on others. How DARE they? I mean, how? I cannot fathom their justifications for this, just as I cannot fathom anit-choicers’. I just DO NOT understand.
I would respect their wishes when it came to their own family members and their own PERSONAL CHOICES, why is it impossible for them to do the same?
It’s impossible for aggressive loonies like these to not try to impose their will on others because for so many of them such behavior has been specifically mandated. They’ve been indoctrinated to believe that they must impose their view of God’s will on others as a way of securing a guarantee that they’ll go to heaven themselves.
This is why they’ll not leave the rest of us alone.
And this is what all the “single-issue voter”, “ideological purity”, “pragmatism”, and “moral values” talk is aimed at turning the Democratic party into. This is what NDN, the DLC, DFL, and all their pet politicians want.
But hey, we’ll be in power. They won’t actually enact the agenda they got elected on, right?
dedicated to defending innocent human life
The word “innocent” certainly gives away the game. They care only about human life when it is in a state where sin is impossible, such as a fetus or a comatose person. The rest of us, literally, can go to hell.
I have a HUGE issue with the word “innocent” in this context. It’s not that I don’t think there is a continuum, but the very connotation of the word implies some sort of moral judgement and in most cases, especailly with the wingnuts, it allows for selective “giving a shit” and that don’t play with me.
My point exactly — it is a moral judgment that only innocent lives are worth saving. If these people didn’t believe that, they couldn’t blithely support policies which were indifferent, for example, to the suffering of a raped woman or a severely disabled baby who will live a short and horrifically brutal life.
And ultimately that makes them completely immoral because they are willing to cause harm to other people in order to satisfy their personal desires.
Sorry if it came off confrontational, it wasn’t meant that way (at least not directed at YOU!)
The pain and suffering these people cause the LIVING in the name of their “morality” and the abstract of “potential” is unconscionable. As I said, and believe me I have tired, I DO NOT (and am coming to believe that I simply CANNOT) understand. I’m just not built that way.
so it’s me that didn’t make it clear and me who owes the mea culpa, not you 😉
And I agree it is very hard to understand how people can be so convinced of their superiority that they believe that forcing their beliefs on others, regardless of the harm it does, is a sign of just how “good’ they are.
I understood exactly what you both were saying. I did not see is as you both did, either…. I simply thought you both were agreeing on the stance you both took. <<looking quisical>>>>
We’re just double-checking to make sure that we’re communicating! And we ARE!
{{{hugs}}}
thank goodness….I do now some nerves are frayed sometimes…:o)…, HUGS back to ya both….
I love it when potential misunderstandings are cut off at the pass! Yet ANOTHER reason I love the people here! 😉
The wackjobs are pretty crafty, considering the intensity of their wackjobbery. They’ve somehow managed to develop a line of bullshit that’s convinced a fair number of Americans that a total wackjob belief system has moral value and logical consistency.
I think a new strategy of calling them out about it everywhere is in order. More specifically, I’m thinking of that one guy who asked Scalia about having anal sex. Anywhere the wackjobs go they should be peppered with obnoxious personal questions drawn from their own agendas and then roundly criticized and openly mocked when it becomes apparent that they only intend for their wackjob belief systems to invade the privacy of other people.
Mock, scorn, heckle, these SOB’s.
Perhaps you heard this story about Ann Coulter. I only wish I had been there to see the look on her face!
“You can’t fire me, because I quit!”
If I ever get arrested, I’m totally gonna say that.
These “new lows” are beginning to look like mile markers on the interstate: you know precisely when one is coming, and can anticipate its appearance just over the next rise. The only difference is that these GOP “slime markers” should be placed every ten feet.
These sick, delusional and inappropriately aggressive lunatics might be defending some twisted definition of “life”, but their disregard and lack of respect for the lives of those they seek to impose their own will on trumps makes a mockery of their purported reverence for life and makes their whole pathological crusade an immoral one.
Another poster here last week said something that I think helps explain it. They said that once you allow hate to start you cannot contain it. There is so much hate in your country right now – hate for each other, right vs left, hate for foreigners (I mean my god, have you seen Lou Dobbs’ show?), hate for everything and everyone that is different, that takes another stand. The Bush Administration allowed hate to fester and spew when they said that everybody who didn’t agree with them was against them. They didn’t do anything to temper the intense anger that many felt, in fact used it, fueled it.
And the Bush Administration has given the religinuts the same type of approval and encouragement. How else can we understand why there is major debate in the year 2005 about teaching ID in highschool? All the circling about sex and how bad it is, and abortion and birth control access, and gay rights wrt marriage, etc. etc. etc. These people experience no condemnation when they assert their god driven agenda over individual’s wishes in a living will, when they proclaim on national television that foreign leaders should be assasinated. No one – from my viewpoint as an outsider watching – in a power or authority position, or who has some sort of voice ever stands up and calls them on this craziness. They say the most astonishing things and no one calls them on it.
It’s fascinating in an horrific sort of way.
I watched Maher’s interview with Sheehan, and he asked her what she really expected to hear from Bush – I mean, did she really think he would say anything different.
Cindy said, No. And this is where I think she makes the most profound statement… She said she fully expects him to repeat the sames memes, but that she wants to call him on them.
That’s what we need to see more of. Calling them on this bs. It’s bs. Straight out.
Hate is a function of fear, and no one has done a more thorough job of inculcating fear into the hearts and minds of the public than the Bush regime and the prominent leaders in the evangelical fascist realm.
If they can get people to be afraid, they can get them to hate. And once they get them to hate they’ve weaponized their ignorance and deployed it against whoever they’ve decided are their enemies.
Hey sbj … were you the one who posted that last week? It’s scary amazing what happens when hate and fear goes unchecked.
No, it wasn’t me, but I certainly appreciate the fact that hate, once manifested, takes on a tenacious life of it’s own, replicating like cancer cells do, relentlessly spreading it’s deadly poison.
How low can they go? Every time I think they’ve reached the limit — the lower they go.
Why are we cursed with these people?
Why do you ask so many freakin’ rhetorical questions. 🙂
Pro-life? I started noticing the phenomenon back in the early ’70s when I got discharged. People who were “early adopters” of substance abuse had somehow been “born again” and began proslytizing. Issue-wise they jumped into the fray on the war, women’s rights, and abortion with abandon. Most of the people I knew grouped them right in there with the Hari Krishnas at airports. A little nuts, but harmless.
They’ve been here throughout our history. They rise and fall according to their acceptance level in society as a whole. Same wine, new bottle. Olivia’s right: smackdown is necessary. Hard to get their attention otherwise.
Kinda like the “Stockholm Syndrome” on a mass scale.
Yes, how did these groups get so powerful when poll after poll over the years supports the idea that most Americans are pro-choice, for right to die and other issues we care about and support.
These groups are scary enough but even worse is the fact that so many with these so called ‘moral’ beliefs are in our legislatures around the country. How did we let that happen?
I don’t get it either, why some group wants to shove their particular moral/religious beliefs down our throats and have the whole country run that way or even why they believe that it is right for them to do so. I understand that attitude and belief about as much as I understand racism which means I just don’t get it.