For 15 years, countless outsiders have hovered over this case, which hangs on who decides life or death for Schiavo, now 41. Until Friday, she was tethered to a feeding tube in a Florida hospice. She breathes on her own, but has no discernible brain activity. Her parents say she warms to the sound of their voices; her husband says it's an involuntary response. Whether to restore Schiavo's feeding tube or to keep it out - the case never ends.
Sure, each of us knows what is best, depending on which way our own intellectual and spiritual GPS points. And the saga of Terri Schiavo has limped way beyond sad and into the realm of the macabre.
I am not going to jump into the morality of this case. I took part in an agonizing family drama 20 years ago that ended in disconnecting my own once vibrant, 57-year-old dad from life-support machinery. Thinking of it today still fills me with a dull ache. I can scarcely fathom the height of arrogance in total strangers who judge these cases from the outside looking in.
But arrogance is the fuel that feeds the greatest outsiders of all in the Schiavo case - our own opportunistic and hypocritical politicians.
On any given day, we have Bush, pushing privatization of Social Security, clamoring for tort reform and ranting against the federal government galloping through our lives. He despises the turn toward "liberal activism" in our federal courts.
Yet in a highly emotional case swirling around one woman and sure to win him a place of honor in every evangelical's scrapbook, Bush has conveniently decided to sidestep the Constitution, which was written to leave most questions of life and death to the states.
Same for Congress, which, sniffing a continuing trend in conservative Christian voting blocs, pole-vaulted toward this opportunity to cloak itself in piety. On the eve of Easter recess, 258 representatives - more than half of the 435-member House - scrambled back to D.C. to cram what Republican leaders dubbed the "Palm Sunday Compromise" in the Schiavo case down America's throat.
What a joke, to watch House Majority Leader Tom DeLay preening and crowing that Democrats who opposed congressional intervention in state business had "so far cost Mrs. Schiavo two meals already today."
All the better to deflect public scrutiny from his own ethical imbroglio over fund raising in his home state of Texas. Or of a widening FBI probe into DeLay's possible connection to two lobbyist friends who may have diverted $2.5 million in lobbying contract funds to contributions, trips and gifts to members of Congress.
Timing is everything. So nice that DeLay can embrace a "choose life" case, cast himself as the guard rooster of morality and ignore that boulder of a mote in his own eye.
Watching this pathetic scramble, I wondered how a somewhat different tangled moral scenario might play out. Say we had a liberal majority in Congress. Say we had two gay men, who chose to marry in Utah and did so with disregard for a state constitutional amendment that prohibits their union. Say the men filed suit, and state courts all the way up the ladder declared the marriage null and void.
And say the men fought, and filed motions and begged until Congress or the president intervened on their behalf, and forced a federal outcome in a state's rights case. Oh, the conservative outcry against "judicial activism." Couldn't you just hear it?
The hypocrisy of it all. Sometimes it runs thick as molten lava.
hmullen@sltrib.com
