Subject: [AthofSV] About Atheism-Republican Fascism, Assault on End of Life Decisions

From: "isaacjs22000" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 21:04:16 -0000

cing the orders of the court. …

    ELLIOTT: Cut the budgets for the court?

    Rep. KING: We can do that. If they're not going to listen to us
any other way–if we pass a law, a specific law, and they reject that
law, then the authority that they will begin to understand is when
their budget starts to dry up, we'll get their attention. That's not
my preferred method. My preferred method is to have them respect the
Constitution and the law. But they are counterproductive to this
country and if we're going to preserve our Constitution, we must get
them in line. 

Let's consider that: if the courts don't do what people like King say,
then the Congress will abolish them and/or eliminate their budgets.
Separation of powers? That's a concept that doesn't exist in King's
amoral universe. The Republican assault on individual rights is
proceeding on the sate level where many are seeking to undermine
spouses' rights to make decisions for each other:

    "What legislatures in Tallahassee and Washington have done in the
last weeks has broken all of our crystal balls," said Kenneth W.
Goodman, an ethics professor at the University of Miami and a
co-director of the Florida Bioethics Network, a group of ethicists who
consult with hospitals on end-of-life care. "In fact, this had been a
settled area in medicine, law, ethics and across the faith traditions
- that it's O.K. to say no to the use of a machine that's keeping you
alive."

    Social conservatives are pushing for laws that put a premium on
preserving life, raising protests from those who have fought for
right-to-die laws, the most far-reaching of which is Oregon's law
permitting doctor-assisted suicide. Those advocates say the Schiavo
case threatens to wipe out their three decades of effort to give
weight to patient choice and quality-of-life considerations.

    In Kansas, a proposal that passed the House by a large margin last
week would require a guardian to get court approval before ending life
support. ... [T]he Alabama Starvation and Dehydration Prevention Act,
which would forbid the removal of a feeding tube without express
written instructions from the patient. And a legislator in Michigan is
writing a bill that would bar adulterers from making decisions for an
incapacitated spouse. ... Ken Connor, a legal adviser to Governor Bush
on the Schiavo case, said Florida should have such a law.

    Florida's 15-year-old Death With Dignity law, one of the few to
say outright that oral declarations of a patient's wishes are valid,
had been considered a model before the Schiavo case. Senator James
King Jr., the Republican who sponsored the law after watching his
father die of cancer, said he felt strongly about the oral-declaration
provision. "I recognized after we started on this that just demanding
a written declaration wasn't going to do it," Mr. King said. Because
people do not like to think about death, he said, "most people would
shy away from exercising their given right." 

There are, of course, quite a few Republicans who value individual
rights and don't want to weaken current laws. They want people to make
decisions about their lives. They want to preserve the institution of
marriage, an institution that relies upon the ability spouses to make
decisions for each other.

Unfortunately, this not the perspective of the Christian Right and the
GOP leadership in America is beholden to the Christian Right. This
means that the GOP at the national level as well as at many state
levels will push hard for new laws that restrict individual liberty in
the name of fundamentalist moral principles. This represents a
tremendous loss both for traditional conservatives as well as
Americans in general.

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