Civil Union or Church Sacrament?

My regrets for the length of this piece, first published at DamnYankee.com, but so much is at stake and much needs be said. I originally wrote this to The Weekly Standard after its 2006 article, "Banned in Boston - The coming conflict between same-sex marriage and religious liberty" by Maggie Gallagher, 05/15/2006, Volume 011, Issue 33. The magazine did not publish or acknowledge my letter. And so, I offer it here.

In Maggie Gallagher’s engaging and informative article [alternate link] about Catholic Charities of Boston in the wake of Goodridge [Massachusetts Supreme Court], neither she nor any of the legal beagles she interviewed so much as mentioned the simplest solution of all. Churches can simply restrict themselves to performing the sacrament of marriage and forgo acting as agents of the State (with a capital 'S' to use Nock’s catch-all term) in certifying a couple’s intentions. Then, those churches interested in marrying same-sex couples but located in states that only recognize male-female marriages can confer the sacrament of marriage on any couple the church alone approves, and likewise for churches that recognize only male-female marriages in states where same-sex civil unions are sanctioned. Never mind that people, such as myself, who are not interested in the government’s sanction of anything we do, can even exchange conventional male-female vows in a non-controversial church ceremony and save the fee downtown.

If a church turns in its permit to certify the civil status of a union, couples married in the church but seeking government sanction as well can then go downtown, right after the wedding or years later, pay the fees, repeat their intentions before a state official if need be, and submit to the State’s blessing at their convenience.

People do the opposite all the time: They save a trip to the church alter and get their civil union, commonly called a marriage, certified at the town office after a religion-free ceremony at a banquet hall. Some even show up at a church years later and ask for a church ceremony, to make it right in the eyes of God.  (And some never bother with either ceremony. This is tolerated more in today’s American culture than ever before; we are collectively unperturbed by any arrangement of co-habitation.)

In this country, perhaps more than in others, we have adapted to a concept that a marriage is one thing and one thing only, that it is the exclusive privilege of the State to sanction, and that, as an option, a church can be called upon to bless it. Gallagher and the experts she interviewed do not seem able to shake this misconception, and thus they predict endless debate and litigation. I wish they had re-examined the common American concept of marriage, which has been confused with the wedding ceremony and all its trappings. Marriage is the union of two people – perhaps even three or more if the state becomes whimsical about it; a wedding is the ceremony and party that result in a marriage.

As for Catholic Charities and the mess they’re in in Boston, it only proves that no good deed goes unpunished. In this country, a church that wants the State to stay out of its affairs will stay out of the government’s affairs. A church that engages in commerce, as Marc Stern pointed out to Gallagher, invites the State’s scrutiny and interference. So too for a church that provides community services cooperatively or under contract with a government agency.

Why, then, does any church assume the civil authority to certify a marriage on the State's behalf? It may well be rooted in the Middle Ages I suppose, but a joint statement of intentions made in a civil hearing and an exchange of vows in a sacramental ceremony are two distinct things with two separate purposes. And, in spite of what legislatures or courts may declare about the civil certification of a union, if churches in the United States would just stick to the sacrament and stay out of the civil certification process, they could always be entirely free to perform the sacrament of marriage, according to their own rules and with couples they select and approve, without asking the government’s permission to do so! People who desire a religious blessing are free to marry in a church and may decline to register the marriage with the civil authorities. And any couple of any description is free to decline Allah’s or God’s blessing and find a civil authority willing to register their pledge (and willing, later, to accept their revocation of it), which the State is free to refer to as a marriage. It is when the church functions as an agent of the State and combines the civil arrangement with the religious sacrament that the State has an interest in who is denied the State's arrangement by being denied the sacrament.

A church may choose not to acknowledge a marriage certified outside its rules, and the State may choose not to recognize the marriage of a couple who have not paid the registration fee and obtained, of all things, a license. (Is that still required?)

A marriage not recognized by the State is no less a marriage in the eyes of God.  Americans seem more concerned with the definition of marriage according to the IRS than the definition according to sacrament. But, in spite of what the Internal Revenue Code may say about it, and I’m not going to waste time searching the Code, even the IRS makes no demand of proof that a couple filing a joint tax return produce a civil license to call themselves married.

I submit that Catholic Charities of Boston, if unable to reconcile the two definitions of marriage, must remain true to its own traditional definition. The church’s standards remain constant, or one can hope that they do, while the State is free to write a law declaring the union of peanut butter and jelly a marriage (requiring a permit), if it wants to. Not realistic? What about the union of three people, then? Is that so far-fetched? And how would a church handle a legislative or court definition like that? If some rich socialite can will her estate to her terrier, what’s to prevent the State from taking the next logical step and permitting her to marry the dog first?

If Massachusetts loses the services of the Catholic adoption agencies because the State has a better definition of marriage, and thereby a better definition of family, then let the State do a better job of handling adoption. That is, let the people of Massachusetts, who presumably are unperturbed by their elected representatives’ fiat in allowing the court to correct the church’s stodgy and now-erroneous definition, fork over the revenue that the State will need to go it alone in adoption services. The people of Massachusetts have said, through their representatives, that they don’t need the church’s help. Let them live with that decision.

It is plain that Massachusetts has, until now, consigned a number of children to Catholic Charities to be placed according to the church’s standards, or according to some standards jointly agreed upon. (And once placed, the children live under the parents’ standards.)  The State now chooses no longer to consign children to that agency, (chooses in the sense that the agency felt compelled to close), because the agency’s standards, which are not changing with the whim of popular culture, were set centuries before there was a fickle legislature in Massachusetts with the voters’ assent to write ever-changing law.

Perhaps the next step will be for the State (of Massachusetts in this case) to follow up by visiting the homes where children have been adopted and ensuring that the adopting parents have the proper non-discrimination notices posted, thus assuring that the children rescued from Catholic Charities are subsequently protected from Catholic influence at home.

This is not a tirade against the exchange of marriage vows by homosexual couples, nor against adoption by homosexual singles or couples. This is merely a defense of the church’s right to remain unaffected by the State in its practice and promotion of its beliefs, and likewise an insistence that the State practice its shenanigans without regard for the sensitivities of any church. In either regard, that is as it should be.

Do I believe that homosexuals should not be parents?  No, I do not believe that.  Do I believe that homosexuals should endure State-sanctioned persecution?  No, nor any persecution. Do I believe that the State, by prohibiting discrimination, will put an end to persecution? No.  And that is where the State’s “solution” becomes insidious, for it is the State’s apparent belief that, by prohibiting discrimination and assiduously enforcing the prohibition, unlawful discrimination will evaporate. In its zeal, the State will neglect certain of its children, perhaps its most vulnerable citizens. It’s a legislative victory on behalf of those who feel stigmatized by society for their sexual orientation. It’s a tragedy, perhaps, for someone more vulnerable.

I do believe it is the duty of those whose activism brings about anti-discrimination legislation to concede that the law will not instantly change people’s perceptions or end discrimination overnight; to concede also that, while unlawful discrimination is not OK, not every corner of the Commonwealth can adapt instantaneously – (just consider the continuing and probably permanent exemptions from the ADA now more than a decade after its enactment), and that there just may be a population more vulnerable than those whose grievance is redressed by a single act of a sacrosanct State, in this case, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.

A vocal cadre of indignant activists, whatever cause they advocate, and a complicit legislature or crusading court, should always consider these realities. That’s not to say that they should jointly search out all possible affected parties and concoct grievances for them too, but only that they should jointly acknowledge, and let the law make allowance for, the fact that, as a society, we are somewhat like a small crowd jammed into an elevator. I shouldn’t be expected to accept having the point of your umbrella jammed into my foot, but I should accept being jostled a little. You should accept my unintentionally offensive odor, but I should take care to bathe daily so that there is at least a limit to how smelly I can be from day to day. And when the door opens and opportunity presents, we should put space, but not hatred, between ourselves.

What’s missing here is tolerance, or, as Maggie Gallagher quoted Marc Stern, “‘Live and let live’ is the only thing around the world that works.” Isn’t it fair to say that those protected by the anti-discrimination law, (the entire body of those protected, as distinct from their most vocal advocates), are chiefly seeking tolerance for what sets them apart? Isn’t it also fair to say that those thus protected owe their fellow citizens tolerance for their various beliefs and standards as well, however distasteful? That was briefly the objective in America, when the law set out to prohibit harmful acts and promote responsible action – before law became the monster it now is, dedicated to the eradication of any notice of obvious differences, the police state of political correctness. It should shame the Massachusetts legislature, and indeed, the people of Massachusetts who permit that body to represent them, that the chief beneficiaries of this new mess will be the lawyers, who will likewise miss the point of tolerance, to the considerable expense of the people of Massachusetts. For a lawyer’s role is to prosecute or defend (or do the research and write the briefs), not to rectify nor even to propose what would make the law better.

A church’s only role in American society, in order to assure First Amendment protection, is to preach its doctrine and exhort its listeners to faith and right action.  Marc Stern agrees when he says, “Beyond speech, nothing is safe.” People exhorted may then individually put their faith into practice without too much threat of State interference. But churches have become big business in America, some, no doubt, with more paid accountants than clergy. Concerted action, in contrast with individual action, makes a church appear very effective in its doctrine and charity, but it also calls the church to submit, account, and justify. I do not disapprove the State's legitimate scrutiny of many churches' big-business affairs, since the Constitution calls upon the federal government to regulate interstate commerce.

For churches worried about whimsical, peanut-butter-and-jelly definitions of marriage, why fret whether federal or state legislators will one day grant religion-based exemptions? This was a development that Robin Wilson speculated on in Gallagher’s article. Why not simply turn in your permits to confer civil status to a marriage and restrict yourselves to conducting religious ceremonies only? And offer newlyweds an instruction brochure explaining, for whatever town or municipality they’re in, how to register for a State “marriage” as well, either before or after the church blessing. For those few couples who still wait for their wedding night, they'll have to choose whether the celebration of the sacrament constitutes the wedding or the hearing on their civil petition. That decision may depend more on whether they’re interested in the IRS benefits, probate, and insurance beneficiary status or in the blessing of God.

Even if the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, or in Massachusetts, gives up certifying the civil status of marriages, the result of Goodridge for Catholic Charities of Boston remains the same. Massachusetts voters have put them out of the adoption placement business. I'm glad I'm not a child-pawn in that state's politics.

2006 ©DamnYankee.com

WWJD About Global Terrorism?

THE EVIL THAT IS UPON US

I first published this in 2005, thus the references to the President at that time. I replay it here because I sense that we may become complacent when there is little happening to alarm us right now.

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With the “war on terror” AKA the “war in Iraq” I have wrestled with the question: WWJD? Recently I had to admit being challenged by it from a bumper sticker.

Politics aside, (because one’s fury at or approval of G.W. Bush does not inform my thinking), it would seem that what I’m trying to resolve is a question of religion. And yet, neither dogma nor mysticism inform my thinking either.

Even atheists who oppose the war must admit that they are oddly in league with those Christians who similarly insist upon peace at any cost, that killing is wrong no matter what the provocation, and that the enemy, whoever it is, needs to be approached sternly but with both logic and limits. Atheists-for-Peace (in Iraq), if that describes them adequately, stop short of like-minded Christians-for-Peace, who can be relied upon to add prayer to their solution.

I have some politically liberal friends whom I love and respect and struggle to understand. We avoid arguing, probably because to do so would inform neither of us but would drive us apart, which would be stupid because neither we nor they will affect the course of this war.

I have supported it, in general, since the USA began cleaning up first Afghanistan and then Iraq. Yes, I trust President G.W. Bush, a lot more than I trusted his opponents and his predecessor. But I’m willing to ask myself whether this is right. Am I supporting the destruction of the world? Am I, out of ignorance, in collusion with satan, as my Christians-for-Peace friends might hope I come to realize? What does satan want? Does this war serve satan, or would our avoidance of this war serve satan better? What does Jesus want? What would Jesus do? What is the difference between this and all other threats?

I have sensed, since it began, that it is different. I have accepted that, because it is different, in a way that I could not until now describe, then our response to it has been appropriate. Not because I was told so in a speech or by a columnist. For me to form an opinion I need information and evidence. And if these don’t point to a clear path of thinking, then I need inspiration.

I don’t subscribe to the opinions of people who demand that I believe because they told me so or because they have the more worthy emotions or because they are justified by their superior intellect, connections, or purity of motive. I don’t subscribe to an opinion because it is widely held, supported by polls, or for the common good.

So in searching for the answer to this deepening ethical dilemma – How can I support a war that confutes the teaching of Jesus? – I have drawn upon the evidence that I have been accumulating for decades: the instruction of my own church. For inspiration, I have looked to my own faith. For facts, I have read the Bible. And what follows is what I see.

When Jesus came right out and said Do this and Don’t do that, he confused his followers, including us, more than when he taught by example and parable. I don’t struggle with the counsel to walk another mile and turn the other cheek. That’s illogical because it is elegant and noble and just might do more to confound an individual enemy than resisting. When he invited the holier-than-thous to cast the first stone, he really was inviting them to compare themselves with their intended victim.

When he asked whose picture was on the conqueror’s coin, he was pointing out that money is of the earth (has it ever been different?) and is controlled by whomever is in power, while people are not Caesar’s but belong to God. Resisting Caesar would amount to wasting energy fighting Romans. By their faith in his illogical pronouncement, his followers were able to create something that eventually would rule Rome, not submit to it.

But the enemies everyone could identify with in that era were, for all their power and arrogance, civil people. Throughout history, there have been many organized forces which descended upon the innocent and conquered without mercy, but their objective was to control and subjugate a nation, a region, or the known world, not to annihilate, and especially not to annihilate out of apoplectic hatred for their chosen enemy. In present time, apoplectic hatred of all Americans is the motive of those who started this.

Attempts at conquest involve nation rising against nation, either to settle a grievance or to satisfy a charismatic if arrogant, self-appointed, self-worshipping ruler. Even though Hitler and Stalin were perhaps the most sinister and duplicitous of them all, they still made a pretense of civility and honor. They needed to be glorified and, even though they made mockery of it, they pretended at diplomacy. Kim Jung-Il does the same today, and will probably not rest until he has attempted to bring more of the world into his fold of worshippers. Not that anyone actually worships him, but he doesn’t know it, such is his delusion like that of Hitler and Stalin, a few Roman emperors, and others.

Islam suffers from the same sort of self-destructive forces in the person of a few ruling do-no-wrong clerics. But Islam is not a country or an ethnic group. Nor is it a unified religious body such as the Roman Catholic Church. Islam is a body of ideas, some of them religious, some even grounded in faith (as opposed to religion or dogma), but not the property of any orderly clerical hierarchy. The high priests of Islam don’t even appear to be interested in finding their own common ground or representing their teaching to the world. (Something like that could also be said about the intolerant, hate-motivated splinter groups of so-called Christians, up to a point.)

The high priests of Islam’s most self-destructive splinter groups aren’t interested in civility amongst themselves or representing their teaching to the world because it is not their objective to win converts. They are preaching hatred for anything and anyone who is not themselves. They don’t want slaves. There is no place in their world for converted followers or repentant non-Muslims. It is ironic that they now have a few tools that they did not have a century or even a quarter century ago, and all are the products of civilized societies: Broadcast media to spread their message, money from oil or plunder (whatever the difference might be), the armaments that their money can buy, and most diabolical of all, the open borders that free societies have permitted in the name of humanity. Ironically, too, they have the complicity of a fawning American communications media, motivated not by love for radical Islam but by hatred for a common enemy, George Bush.

It is with the tools made possible by our prosperity and generosity that we are being attacked. This time in history, though, the enemy is anywhere and everywhere. There is no leader who, by our taking him out, leaves the movement stalled or stopped. Since it is not a nationalist movement, there is no single country to overpower to stall or stop the movement.

And since the movement is not interested in our subservience, our gold, our conversion, or our appeasement, there may be no stopping it. It was easier to wipe out smallpox than it will be to put down radical militant Islam.

Regardless which way we react, with guns or with olive branches, we face one choice and that is to wait it out. Turning the other cheek will have no influence on their loathing for all things American or Jewish or Christian. So what do we do while their fury runs its course?

Options:

...Duck every time there is a bombing in a civilized part of the world such as Spain or Indonesia or England or the USA, then carry on as if it was another hurricane that can’t be prevented or diverted.

...Send money and suicidal volunteers to the mountains of the Middle East to set up schools for teaching the peaceable tenets of Islam, and hope to have more influence than the radical militants.

...Appeal to the good will and spirit of cooperation of desperately poor and uncooperative nations such as Russia and China and ask them to intervene to persuade the radical militant rabble-rousers to look more kindly on the USA, so we can resume exporting Barbi dolls and Coca-Cola to the Middle East.

No, these aren’t options, and I won’t go on.

War is a great waste of resources and lives, but Jesus did not suggest how to deal with this enemy. Rather, I’m somewhat persuaded that he warned of this enemy and this time. I am not a student of Revelation, nor do I want to be. It accomplishes nothing if I spend the next ten years of my life becoming yet another expert on the end times; (experts on Revelation have come and gone by the thousands). But I could be persuaded that we are there or nearly so.

I’ve tried to discover the rational, productive, and inspired response to the attacks on the free world by this newly-empowered force which, as I admit, we have helped to create. If a military response is appropriate, then it must be everything we can do or nothing at all. Anything in between will be like Vietnam. And damn the United Nations; half the nations involved are state sponsors of terrorism, so it’s no wonder the UN isn’t united on this problem.

If the response is heightened security, then let it rise to a level that will truly thwart homeland terrorism. Anything less will be a waste of resources and an acceptance of random attacks. No security at all is, to me, not an option, especially when the earliest victims of a casual attitude will be slaughtered or poisoned innocents, including more children, and letting our lives ever more be controlled by the fear of another attack now and then. I may be uncomfortable in the summertime wearing long clothes against the insects, but if I want to reduce the bites and stings I live with the extra heat.

Whether we submit to the attacks of those who hate us and regard it as a fact of life in the modern world, or respond with decisive force and intrusive scrutiny, as we have begun to do, I am persuaded that we are in it for a very long, long time. Those whose anger at the USA is so profound that they will commit suicide in order to express it do not represent a passing fad. They represent a still-growing movement. Ignore them and they won’t go away. They will not be satisfied until they have annihilated us.

What does Jesus want me to do? Well, there is frankly little that I can do, personally. I wish there were effective channels for me to do something beyond the borders of my own country, but at least I can look after those in need in my own country. I can and do vote. But I vote with different things in mind than a single issue that has most affected my “consciousness.” I vote based on my understanding of government and how I believe candidates will uphold the Constitution, not based on contrived issues such as abortion-as-birth-control or campaign finance "reform" or fake immigration reform. Candidates dangle their positions on issues before us to attract our votes when they know full well they have little chance of delivering on their promises. We are fools to let their stands on issues influence us. It's their position on government that matters to me – the less of it the better and the less intrusion and money poured into other countries the better.

If I have the opportunity to come face to face with an open-minded Muslim who has yet to form an opinion of Americans, I hope I as an individual will have contributed to a favorable impression. But what are the chances that such an opportunity will fall to me?

America has been attacked by these indistinct forces somewhat due to our own indifference toward the nations that they come from, but moreso due to their envy, the misinformation fed to them by their own leaders, and the machinations of their own minds, steeped in ignorance of us. When mosquitoes swarm, I swat. I don’t kill or chase them all away, but fewer get to poke me. I don't try to talk them out of it. They want my blood. I am definitely less efficient in whatever I’m doing if I’m flailing at them, but the alternative – simply letting them all stick me – is unthinkable. Let that be an analogy.

I wish I could regard the “enemy combatants” as redeemable individual humans. They won’t let me. Jesus submitted to his crucifixion without flailing or fighting back or calling upon his followers to attack his captors and free him. But I argue that he knew that his individual death, so inscrutably accepted by him, would affect the entire world. If I submit to death by a mindless enemy, it will not affect the world as did his, and so I am motivated to resist, on an individual level.

Perhaps we humans have reached the limit of our ability to civilize ourselves, the limit of our ability to cooperate to any greater extent. Perhaps this is as good as it gets. Four fifths of the world still lives in conditions no better than a thousand years ago. It’s America’s delusion that there is a bright future ahead for humanity with disease-free planned communities and sanitary food and free cellular phones for everyone on earth. We tried to show the world that it can be done: Individuals can have liberty and self-determination; and left to choose whether to be selfish or charitable, people will mostly chose to give to those in need. Supply will meet demand when markets are left to take care of distribution and cost. People freed from tyranny will invent and invest. Information will flow.

Well, we have demonstrated all of that. But the rest of the world only stares at us in wonder, then envy, then hatred. They don’t perceive that they, too, can chose what we have. They are persuaded, instead, that they cannot, and they would deny us the same. When they can lash out at us in the name of God, they are justified.

A long war has only just begun. It may cost the USA all that we have left in lives and resources, not to mention money and the destruction that will be wrought wherever we meet the battle. But I can see no alternative. Not to engage them is to invite an equal waste of lives and resources and destruction in a place of their choosing, not ours. It matters not to them who dies, as long as the maximum number of Americans (or Brits or Spaniards, etc.) are destroyed. In a war, however peculiarly it is fought, the individual foot soldiers of the enemy cannot be indicted and “brought to justice.” In a war, they get picked off before they pick you off. They disguise themselves as or hide behind “civilians” and so the innocent in their own countries are victims. So are the innocent in this country.

I find only one clear answer in the Bible. I find no evidence that Jesus dealt with or told anyone else how to deal with humans who turn themselves into mosquitoes or vipers or whatever non-human analogy best describes the plague that is upon us. I am not persuaded that the enemy we now face is even fully human except in DNA. I do not purport to be an expert on evil, so I will refrain from declaring those who would destroy me as evil, in the sense that would make them literally agents of satan. They are evil in the sense that they are fiercely dedicated to opposing the will of God, inasmuch as we, as a society, have constructed our world on the premise that God is love and that the two great commandments should guide our thoughts and our actions.

In the Bible, the answer is in the words of Jesus. Yes, all of his teaching points to faith in God and love of oneself and others, but there is one more dimension to it: You improve humanity by improving the one human unit over which you have control – yourself. He does not preach collective action, the joining of movements or armies or political parties or even churches. He preaches to each individual the responsibility to get oneself right with God. That’s what Jesus would do. Improve your one human unit. Get yourself right with God. And let those who have eyes see your plain example and those who have ears hear your humble words. Jesus does not call upon us to create or join a tumult.

Armies and parties and mass movements do not improve me, as a unit, and they do not help me by showing up on my doorstep, whether with aid or demands. Likewise, I cannot presume to improve any other human being by showing up, as part of a group, on someone else’s doorstep with a demand or with unrequested aid. Those who have joined the armies of this country to defend it are doing me a favor, just as I did by joining up during the Vietnam war, and it is a favor rather than a curse only because the motives of the individual recruits in this country’s armed forces are benevolent and defensive – note I say the motives of the individuals.

I will carry on with my life as best I can. I will think globally and act locally. In thinking globally, I will not regard the hate-motivated, random-destruction-of-anything-that-can-be-a-target as an acceptable norm, therefore I will not oppose reasonable efforts to stop it. I will vote to reduce the reach of government both within this country and abroad. Locally, I will act as I have been inspired to do by my God. Locally, too, I will defend, with adequate force, if an enemy such as this appears personally on my doorstep.

What God has in mind to resolve this conflict and repair this mess I don’t presume to discern, and I will be skeptical of anyone who confidently tells me he has discerned God’s mind on this. I think we will be shown, in the fullness of time. As I await, I will attempt to do what only I can do: Make myself one person who the rest of the world does not have to carry owing to my own irresponsibility and does not have to avoid because I have become a threat.

11 July 2005 ©David A. Woodbury

Genealogy of Joseph

This seven-minute clip on the genealogy of Joseph, the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus, is convincing enough to me. Not that it is relevant to anyone's faith; who was Joseph's grandfather is entirely of no consequence to the divinity of Jesus. It is just a little explanation of what at first glance appears to be a contradiction between the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Unfortunately, the man speaking throughout this clip is not identified, and may or may not be the "NathanH83" who uploaded it to YouTube. So have a look.

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Hold This Image in Your Mind

Let me share something with you, and I wrote this spontaneously on December 18 when our good and humble friend, (and next-door neighbor for eleven years), Debbie Lyons was dying.  I sent it to her grandson, Joshua, whom she had raised.  (And she died just a few days later): "Hold this image in your mind: A grand reception room in Heaven, bigger than any room ever built on earth; a huge heavenly host has gathered. A door opens, and a very tired little lady steps inside not knowing what to expect. When she comes through the door, the room erupts in applause and cheers. And a great but gentle voice is heard over it all: "Well done, Debbie. Now come rest beside Me and let me hold you."

I have an old friend nearby who is about to slip away.  This is how I imagine his arrival in Heaven, too -- and the arrival of all the weary travelers on this earth who have ever had faith and who have done what they could and at last had to let go and let God.

And when I go that way some day, I imagine being nudged through a doorway, in a dimension beyond our own and in a realm I don't comprehend, and I sort of anticipate the room I envisioned for my friends who went before me, and if it is anything like that, then I am confident I will see Debbie's face in the welcoming throng, and Bob's, and maybe quite a few more.

It's difficult to express just how, but I know that's what happened when Debbie arrived.  I knew it the moment I perceived it.

Revisiting the Execution of Terri Schiavo

UPON THE EXECUTION OF TERRI SCHIAVO
Note: I first published this in March, 2005 at www.DamnYankee.com because I was stunned that a Florida judge ordered Terri, a U.S. citizen, to be executed by starvation without being charged with a crime or the benefit of a trial.  Tens of thousands of Americans in circumstances similar to hers are vulnerable to the same sentence for the same reasons that led to Terri's execution.  I still hope to stir some national resolve on this topic in 2012.  Don't know who she was?  Go to www.terrisfight.org.

By now Terri Schiavo’s experience should have launched a national debate about how to dispose of nuisance citizens in a manner that is consistent, discreet, legal, sanitary, and (most importantly) humane.  While she is merely the latest of thousands of people in the U.S.A. who have been dispatched when their guardians have grown weary or have given up hope, she has generated enough media attention that no thinking person can be unaware of the debacle.

WHY DEBATE IT?
We need to engage in this debate without submitting to the emotion of the zealots forever commanding media attention over abortion (both sides), who, for years, have shouted from the same opposing ramparts and have prevented rational dialog.  Many of the same zealots have tried to hijack the Schiavo situation.  Anyone with megaphones needs to be ignored by those who want to resolve the matter.

We need to have this debate among ourselves, as Americans, and we need to leave the rest of the world out of it.  Many other countries have their own solutions.  If we were fully aware how inconvenient citizens are disposed of in other countries from Scandinavia to Southeast Asia, it would be sobering to everyone on both extremes on the Schiavo issue.  We might, however, study other countries’ solutions and find some guidance there, guidance both for how to select individuals to be dispatched and what methods are most efficient.

We need to make this a national debate not subject to states’ rights.  Rather, we need to define that which makes us citizens of the U.S.A.; clearly we understand that one is a citizen who has been born here or naturalized and who has not renounced citizenship.  We even confer citizenship posthumously.  What about citizens who are still breathing?  We need to decide when a breathing corpse, as Terri Schiavo was clearly perceived by Judge Greer, ceases to hold the rights of citizenship.

The definition of “dead” used to be a lot simpler in centuries past, but now we seem uncertain whether a “viable fetus” is alive, whether a body on “life support” is alive, and whether a person who is “brain dead” is alive.  Terri Schiavo was deemed dead enough in one respect that a court ordered her body deprived of food and water so that it would have the good sense to go with the already dead part.  We need the national debate to define “dead” once and for all.  And concomitantly it can encompass the definition of “not-yet-alive.”  We permit fetuses with beating hearts to be declared not alive yet, so maybe that could be instructive at the other end of... of a lifetime.  (Heart beating but not yet alive: heart still beating but already dead.)  We need one definition nationally, because, once again, there cannot be fifty definitions of a U.S. citizen.

We need to debate this definition outside the courts.  Courts settle disputes according to laws already on the books and decide the constitutionality of such laws.  There is nothing in a national debate for the courts to get involved in as long as there is not yet a national consensus and a national law on what “dead” means.  Judge George Greer, the unwitting villain in the Terri Schiavo case, took it upon himself to declare her legally dead.  But he was grasping at a definition that did not yet exist in our laws.

We need to disregard what will surely be a shrill attempt by lawyers to lead the debate.  Again, it concerns what is not yet law, and what is already law must be set aside.  Legal precedent does not inform us here.  “Not-yet-alive” and “dead” are concepts found in our national soul, not in the Internal Revenue Code.  Lawyers should be welcome in any national debate not as experts on irrelevant law but as individuals who may or may not have personal experience that informs each one’s position.

We need to reach one accord and then tell Congress what we’ve decided.  Congress then needs to render our decision in the form of a simple, unequivocal law.  “This (insert results of debate here)  is what defines life.  Anything not fitting this definition is not life.  Dispose of corpses appropriately.”  And, incidentally, that which defines not-life for humans ought also to apply to beached porpoises, comatose rhesus monkeys, laboratory rats, and the like.

Indeed, a constitutional amendment may be the proper result.  We cannot leave it to different courts with 50 separate sets of state laws to decide upon different ways to execute nuisance citizens.

This debate needs to be held by ordinary citizens and the rational organizations that represent many groups of citizens.  It is not a debate that can be resolved in Congress, because nothing decided in Congress has anything to do with finding a real solution, much less dealing with anything but contrived problems.  Congress is ever obsessed with finding a compromise, between opposing sets of values, that both sides can agree wreaks the least political damage to the two parties that control the government.  Compromise in Congress is not about agreeing on fixing something; compromise is about appearing to fix something and getting at least part of the credit.  When the fix doesn’t work, each side can say it wasn’t their fault because their entire agenda wasn’t incorporated in toto into the “solution.”

We need to have this debate because, through our collective compassion, we have preserved populations of humans in our midst who cannot be relied upon to take responsibility for themselves: pathological criminals, the seriously mentally ill, those with serious physical or mobility limitations, the seriously mentally retarded, the frail and demented elderly, and of course, those in a rapidly-deteriorating state or a persistent vegetative state, which may have arisen out of anything from birth defects to terminal deterioration to self-inflicted loss of function or consciousness.  Terri Schiavo reached her persistent vegetative state by initially depriving herself of nutrition necessary to sustain consciousness.  Others inflict permanent incapacity upon themselves by such means as over-consumption of substances that they know will destroy them, by submitting themselves to absurd risks, and by overtly attempting, and failing, to kill themselves.

WHO GETS TO TALK?
In order to have a rational national debate, we need to reach a consensus on who represents some of us.  I prefer to speak for myself, but others are not confident doing so.  So I’m on my soap box and you can get onto yours.  Or you can get behind someone who thinks like you do.

There is a vanguard of citizen groups that vigorously oppose the death penalty under all circumstances.  Of all citizen movements, this one, to my observation, generates perhaps the most universal respect for its agenda.  We should consider including these people as rational participants in the debate.  There is another vanguard that advocates permitting the terminally ill the option of assisted suicide.  This too is, for the most part, a rational and compassionate group of citizens and we should let them participate.  And there are rational voices on the plight of the unborn.  Zealots, too, on both sides of that, but the rational voices can be identified.

We should let the politicians participate who have a personal perspective to contribute.  Otherwise, they are our servants and should sit it out until they are instructed to act.  Even those of us who are “members” of passionate organizations must agree to set aside our most ardent passions and tell our too-vocal organizational leaders to put a cork in it.

A debate needs moderators.  A national debate needs someone to do this who can command some media attention, some financial backing, and most importantly, the respect of a significant majority of us.  When two former Presidents appeared together to appeal for voluntary contributions from Americans for victims of the 26 December 2004 tsunami, they formed such a team.  They are not necessarily the ones to manage a national debate, but they suggest one sort of possibility.  Twenty years ago another group of influential people came together for one brief session and recorded “We Are the World.”  The effect was fleeting but pervasive.  Americans from two to 102 were singing it.  People like those who made that song are acting responsibly when they allow themselves to be persuaded to use their enormous influence in an unusual  but benevolent way.

I’m merely squeaking like a cricket under the porch.  I can’t bring the media to my door to listen to this idea.  I can hope only that someone with that kind of power pauses to listen to me chirp for a moment, and understands.

A debate, though, involves a clash of opinions.  It differs greatly, too, from the din of opposing zealots.  Zealots try to shout each other down and rely not upon thoughtful argument but upon insult and rage.  In a debate, the opposing sides at least suspect that the other side has a point that could be respected.  They listen to one another.  And they submit their best arguments to a panel or a populace.  When the populace decides, the debaters accept the result.

WHAT DO I THINK?
And so, as I advocate for a national debate, I am offering opinions along the way in the hope of stimulating support or opposition, but opposition that attempts to persuade me, not destroy me.

For my own part, I certainly have an opinion.  I also have a personal perspective.  And I have an emotional response to the Terri Schiavo incident as well, so I’ll get that out and be done with it: I struggle with a court’s decision that Terri Schiavo didn’t feel her starvation and thirst.  We assume that a hanged criminal doesn’t feel the snap when his neck breaks.  But we don’t kill people that way any more.  In the judge’s opinion, she wouldn’t feel it because she was already legally dead.  Since his was a legal opinion not subject to direct knowledge of what she could feel, it is no more valid than my opinion, legally held, that any judge who could reach that conclusion wouldn’t feel it if a broomstick were rammed up his rectum and then mounted on a marble column on the front of his courthouse.  You had a tough case put before you, Judge Greer.  But I think a brilliant judge could have alerted the legislature in a different way to tell them that there is a law on the books that stinks and needs to be rectified.  It didn’t require a human sacrifice.

There.  Now I don’t need to say it again.

I also have a global, (in the sense of wider), more comprehensive, perspective.  But first my personal perspective: For fifteen years I too have lived with someone who has survived all that time only because of a feeding tube.  (We never thought of it as “life support” though.)  He doesn’t walk or speak.  He follows a balloon with his eyes when it is passed before him.  He is diapered 24 hours a day and must be bathed and wheeled about.  We, his family, believe that he takes pleasure in things, and we can tell when he is uncomfortable, but when he hurts he can’t show us where, or when he is frightened, why.  Maybe we are deluded to think that he communicates in his own way.  Maybe his quality of life is crap too.  On paper he would appear to a judge to be a lot like Terri Schiavo.  Certainly he is a financial burden on society, on Medicaid and the medical insurance, and on his family.  Maybe it’s time to stop feeding him, too.  Who wants to sit there and keep vigil while my son starves to death?

On a wider perspective, I learned a little about Dr. Albert Schweitzer when I was a youth.  His influence on me is borne in the term he coined: “reverence for life.”  To the extent that that concept affects us, we struggle to understand the killing that is necessary so that we might eat and the killing that others force us into so that we might defend ourselves.  But necessary killing does not justify unnecessary killing.  To this day, I still release spiders outside that I have caught in the house, rather than killing them.

Perhaps those same words, which describe the principle Dr. Schweitzer attempted to elucidate in his Philosophy of Civilization, published in 1923, became the basis for our culture’s turn toward greater compassion for all people.  Perhaps, though, that turn had already begun to take place and Dr. Schweitzer merely uttered what was already understood.

WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OURSELVES?
Thus, years before I had heard of Terri Schiavo, I had begun to contemplate the inevitable consequence of America’s scramble to assist all people, in whatever manner of decay and incapacity, to hold onto life at any cost – cost in money and cost in effort.  In the first place, assisting children with genetic mental and physical challenges to reach adulthood – children who until a hundred years ago or less would have died sooner (and still do, of course, in most of the rest of the world) – helps assure that their genetic material will be passed on.  As more and more medical solutions are made available, more and more children or their guardians assert a right to those solutions.  I participate in that process myself on behalf of my son.

With medicines and machines we already preserve the elderly, including the hopelessly demented elderly, beyond their ability to sustain themselves, and at extraordinary cost and extraordinary emotional drain.  We wage costly battles against dread diseases on a national and international scale, fighting malaria and polio, smallpox and influenza.  These largely indiscriminate, periodic, shotgun-approach campaigns affect whomever they can and leave others at times unprotected.  But we also wage costly individualized battles against such dread diseases as cancer, on the premise that every American has the right to muster whatever resources one can on the off-chance of becoming one more survivor.

When people who are predisposed to develop such a disease, and who are young and strong enough to recover, do survive, they often reproduce, increasing the odds that there will be more people genetically predisposed to the same disease in the future.  When someone is severely injured in an accident or loses significant function due to a stroke, just two more examples out of many, we don’t just let them go.  We encourage them to try electric scooters at public expense (Medicare), prostheses, and rehabilitation of indefinite duration.

We build dialysis centers, and clinics to rehabilitate addicts who would otherwise die in oblivion and who are at increased likelihood to become candidates for long-term care later anyway.  We agonize over the homeless and try to steer them toward wellness and recovery at public expense, and largely public waste, considering their recidivism.

Nowadays we give no thought to the marriage of a man and a woman who each endure severe myopia (of the visual kind), people who in past centuries may have been ridiculed and tortured for their clumsiness or devoured for their blindness before the opportunity occurred to marry and reproduce.  As innocuous as it seems, this too is an example of our rush to assure the physical weakening of our population.  And so it goes with people who have chronic asthma, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, a predisposition to addictive behavior, hemophilia, and the list is endless.  It is our national will to assure us each and every one the fighting chance we never before would have had... to weaken the gene pool.

We have declared insane asylums inhumane, even though they once helped keep our streets safer and to some extent inhibited procreation.  We have moved their populations into the communities to be integrated as much as possible with regular folks.  That’s good!  They have rights.  They aren’t dead yet either!

Nobody wants to volunteer to forgo available medical treatment that will help them fight their way back from a disease or injury.  Nobody wants to abandon their physically or mentally weak children or grandparents to the life they would lead if they had to be dependent completely on their own responsibility and faculties.

We all want assistance in all of these circumstances.  Most of those who don’t have insurance have some claim to public funds for acute or critical care.  Other than the somewhat-meaningless lifetime maximums in health insurance policies, there are no limits to what someone can seek for treatment.  Seek it, schedule it, and ask for donations to help pay the bills afterward.  Declare bankruptcy if you must.  But our attitude is that we don’t have to sit home and die as our ancestors did when they knew it was serious.  And there are certainly no statutory limits to the care one may seek.

We are becoming a nation almost overrun with people who are, if not outright nuisances to the rest of us because of their dependency, at least greatly inconvenient to have around.  We must discuss whether this is the way we want to go on.  Unless we do something, the percentage of nuisance people in the population will only increase.  Are we okay with this?

ISN’T THERE AT LEAST SOMEWHERE WE CAN START?
Terri Schiavo’s example at least begs the debate on whether we can’t get rid of a few – perhaps quite a few – people who have no awareness, no hope of developing any awareness, and presumably have no quality of life.  (If we don’t debate it and agree, then we’ve already assented to let the judges decide quality of life for us based on “law. “)

It almost leaves moot the debate on what to do with people who are plainly and permanently unconscious.  At this point, consider the distinction between awareness and consciousness.  Terri Schiavo was conscious and had a relatively normal wake-sleep cycle.  But she was arguably not aware.  She apparently processed nothing that her senses took in.  At best, she had reflexive responses to certain stimuli.  So say certain “experts, “ anyway.

Unlike her, my son, despite the superficial similarities, is aware.  He is in an aggressive school program where he has learned to communicate through a picture-exchange system.  He follows precise verbal instructions to match, separate, and otherwise manipulate objects.  He soothes himself by playing sometimes sweet, sometimes raucous “tunes” on the piano.  He points when asked to “pick the one you want.”  If he is sitting on the floor before the television and we cajole him to turn it on, he will scoot to it and press buttons until it comes on.  He has a couple of hand signs which he invented and uses to communicate.

Someone who is conscious, then, may or may not be aware.  But someone who is aware is, almost by definition, also conscious.  (I had to say “almost” because I’ve read Dalton Trumbo’s poignant novel, Johnny Got His Gun.  Poignant because it's fiction; tragic were it true.  But let’s not go there.)

If you haven’t seen them, there are institutions in every state where children, born in a persistent vegetative state are cared for who can’t be cared for in their own homes and for whom there is a paucity of foster homes.  I’m familiar with such an institution and, as closely as discretion allowed, have spent considerable time observing the conscious-but-not-aware, immobile children that mostly populate the place.

If it’s cruel to say it and nobody else wants to, then I will be the first: These children are an inconvenience.  Many of them I’ve seen have no awareness, no hope of developing any awareness, and presumably no quality of life.  Many have been abandoned by their birth parents.  Under the criteria used to kill off Terri Schiavo, these children are indistinguishable from her, in other words, legally dead already, under Florida law anyway.  They are, nevertheless, U.S. citizens and, without a clear expression of national will codified into law, judges in different states have the option to order them executed under a mish-mash of indistinct state laws.  (I use the term “execute” rationally and according to its dictionary definition: to “put to death according to law.”  But then, I see my error: How could Terri Schiavo be put to death when, although her heart continued to beat on its own and she breathed without assistance, she was already legally dead.  You cannot kill again that which has already died...  You see, I can appreciate both sides of the debate!)

WHY IS THIS SO IMPORTANT?
A nation with a growing population of nuisance individuals needs to decide what to do with them.  Why?  Because it costs a lot to maintain them and they are consuming valuable time and resources that could be applied to the living?  Some day that will be the incentive, but not yet.  Because they are weakening the gene pool?  That’s really only a mild side-effect involving a few individuals at this point.

We need to decide what to do with them because if we don’t reach one accord, we must realize that some day each of us may become not a national inconvenience but a personal inconvenience to the ones we most depend upon to look out for our interest.  Any of us may, then, be deemed unable to feel or comprehend and may then be sentenced to death by starvation or some such method.  Why would we want to subject our loved ones to the agonizing decision that Michael Schiavo had to come to and the rest of the family to a feud with no winner?

We could choose, after rational, national debate, to continue to be compassionate toward the partly dead among us, so that those who, like Michael Schiavo, have simply gone on as long as they can and need to be relieved will have a recourse other than a court order of execution.  Those who give up caring for the partly dead need to be forgiven for giving up but also need to understand that there should be no financial gain or loss in doing so.  They need the liberty to turn guardianship and custody over to the state, not so that the state can put their vegetable to death, but so that the state can then contract for further care if not equipped to maintain nuisance people in state-run semi-incarceration or warehouses.  A necessary adjunct to this decision will be to make possible a network of foster homes where people who have been turned over to the state can be cared for with the compassion that others can no longer muster.

Or we could create a national rating system and simply execute people who don’t score above, say, a ‘two’, or some logical but fixed threshold.  If we do create a national rating system that provides for the execution of people who don’t meet the threshold, Terri Schiavo being a good example, those of us with loved ones in declining health who can’t speak for themselves – my son for instance – must accept the national will and step aside when that threshold is passed on one’s way to total death.  We must let the last heartbeat be assigned by the state, but according to a national law or constitutional amendment that leaves little doubt what the criteria are.

HOW CAN I INTERCEDE ON MY OWN BEHALF?
However such a debate might turn out, let us nevertheless accept the wishes of each individual who, while coherent, has expressed a desire to avoid “heroic measures” and “life support” when in a coma, persistent vegetative, or even quadriplegic completely-dependent state.  That is, if the national will dictates that we must sustain what life remains by whatever means are possible – pretty much as things are now despite the winds of change heralded by our collective apathy over Terri Schiavo – and if the individual says: “When I’m clearly on my way out, let me go,” then the debate should let the perspective of that individual be respected.

If instead the national will dictates that a scorecard will determine when to execute someone, but that someone, while aware and reasonably believing that such an end is coming, chooses a quicker end, that means ought to be arranged and respected.

For what follows it is necessary to acknowledge that there are several versions of the life of dubious quality.

• There is the person who was born essentially legally dead, or what is genteelly referred to as a persistent vegetative state – PVS.
• There is the person who has, for whatever reason, slipped into a permanent but persistent state of unconsciousness, PVS, and depends on artificial support only for sustenance.  (This was Karen Ann Quinlan.)
• There is the person who has, for whatever reason, slipped into a permanent but persistent state of unconsciousness or unawareness and depends on artificial support for respiration or circulation or both, as well as for sustenance.
• There is the conscious person who depends on artificial support for respiration, circulation, or sustenance, or any combination of the three, but who can persist indefinitely, even function productively, with that support.
• There is the person who is conscious and aware but severely mentally impaired, either from birth or from the occurrence of some event, who is dependent on artificial support for respiration, circulation, or sustenance, or any combination of the three.  (This is my son, Sam, who is on “life support,” that is, a feeding tube, for sustenance only.)
• There is the person who is apparently conscious but who persistently has no apparent awareness of things and is therefore dependent on artificial support for respiration, circulation, or sustenance, or any combination of the three.  (This was Terri Schiavo, who was on “life support,” that is, a feeding tube, for sustenance only.)
• There is the conscious person who is enduring a slow, agonizing death and who must gradually be brought under artificial supports as well as treatment for pain.
• There is the unconscious person who is enduring a slow, agonizing death and who must gradually be brought under artificial supports as well as treatment for pain.
• There is the person who was apparently healthy only a few days beforehand and who is rapidly slipping away due to a virulent infection, other ravaging illness, or mysterious causes.
• And on it goes.

Given that I do not expect the U.S.A. to take from the Terri Schiavo incident any cogent lesson (but rather, I expect us to turn it over to Congress for endless, tiresome “debate”) and that, therefore, I will one day want to spare my loved ones the absolute whim of a court, for I seriously anticipate arriving at a state of complete dependence some day, I offer the following alternative.  It is my hope that, if the determination of my percentage of deadness is up to a court to decide, then the court will consider this analysis, or better still, will turn the matter over to my family because I have had the good sense to give some guidance here, thus sparing the court the trouble.

I should define clearly that my family, or loved ones, for purposes of this question, are my wife and two biological daughters.  That’s not to imply that I don’t also love someone else, but I don’t want my other loved ones, however many they may be, given control over my death or execution.  I’m sure the three I’ve named, or those that remain of the three when my time comes, can readily come to one accord and I bless that decision here and now.

THE TEST
If I am incompletely dead and anyone should suspect that the best thing for them, for me, and for my fellow man is that the rest of me should be put down, give me this test.  ‘Yes’ answers point toward sustaining life, ‘No’ answers point toward certain death.

Absent heroic measures and intensive testing:

1. Can I breathe on my own?

2. Does my heart beat reliably without external stimulus or support?

3. Can I cooperate with my own feeding or care?

4. Am I (apparently or occasionally – briefly every day for instance) conscious?

5. Perhaps restating #4, do I respond occasionally and deliberately to questions, gestures, or touch, and do two or more people agree that I do?

Given at least some intensive testing:

6. Am I free from virulent infection or other consumptive disease that, in my state, is likely to kill me in a few days anyway?  (Note: ‘No’ means Yes I have such a condition.)

7. Do I have any brain activity suggestive of awareness?

8. Is there a rational basis to assume I’ll ever again become conscious or aware?

9. Are my ancillary systems such as kidneys functioning with apparent intent to continue as they would if I were normal for my age?

10. Do two or more dispassionate “experts” agree that I have some residual cognitive consciousness, awareness, or potential for recovering some rational conscious awareness?

Once this test has been given, if there is any disagreement among my loved ones, I then suggest that two or more dispassionate individuals be chosen by consensus of my loved ones and be charged to interpret the results and render their advice.  I then enjoin my loved ones to accept that advice.  If I have, previous to becoming incapacitated, expressed a desire to be supplied with the means to artificially accelerate the end, that is, the means to finish dying quickly, then I request that two or more dispassionate individuals advise my loved ones on that matter and that they likewise accept the advice, to the extent that they may legally do so.

(I would not ask to have an assisted suicide arranged for myself unless I were consciously aware of present or impending unendurable pain.)

On the above test, if I score two or more on the Yes side in #1 through #5, then I think I would like to be sustained until it is more clear which way I will go.  If I get one or two in the Yes column on #1 through #5 but it’s doubtful, then I would like to be sustained for a while if I also get two more in the Yes column on #6 through #10.  In no event do I want to be kept alive for more than a year if I am unconscious or apparently unaware throughout that time.  I’d probably be fine checking out after six months in that state, but if more passionate individuals prevail, then let them understand it just can’t go past a year.

HOW WOULD I HAVE YOU LET ME GO?
If I have become apparently unaware and there is no prognosis for regaining awareness, as would be the case if I were being consumed by a virulent infection or metastasizing cancer, I also don’t want to be kept “alive” by heroic means.  Here’s an example how to interpret the test above.  If I’m not conscious, therefore on “life support” for sustenance, AND if either my breathing or heart won’t keep going without tubes and wires, AND if I ain’t coming back from this situation, then give it a few days if you must and then let me go.  I don’t consider Terri Schiavo that far gone, by the way.

I participated in the decision to “unplug” my father only four or five days after he had packed to leave the hospital under his own power following surgery for lung cancer.  But he had a serious reversal, and the decision was simple when the answer to #1 through #6 and #8 through #10 above was No in every instance.  I don’t remember whether #7 was answered.  Was that an execution?  Nooooo, because he wasn’t “put to death according to law.”  It was a medical determination, and the answer to #6 was the clincher.  Life support systems would have been insufficient to sustain him for another day anyway.  He drew his last breath two or three minutes after being disconnected from the ventilator.

So, on the supposition that the national debate and clear direction to the courts will not be forthcoming in my lifetime, I wonder what I would prefer if I were not clearly dead but were deemed by a court to be dead enough to be finished off in some gruesome way – if I were in Terri’s predicament.  And not only I, but if I am called upon to concur that a person under my care and guardianship is likewise due to be dispatched, these are a few of the ways I’d consider among my options, for myself and for someone else:

• Starvation and thirst – The Terri Schiavo solution.  This is slow and, I must believe, agonizing even to a person who is already partly or legally dead.  The brain stem is a powerful advocate for food and water, and it is the brain stem that sustains respiration and circulation.  For me, at least, I would ask that my guardians consider my will to eat and drink as strong as my will to breath and pump.
• Suffocation – Not with a pillow pressed over the face.  That would be too dramatic.  Instead, this could merely be a plastic tent placed over the head to slowly reduce the supply of oxygen to my lungs.  One assumes that I wouldn’t have the involuntary reflex to strike the tent away with my already-dead arms.  As long as it was a “natural” suffocation by merely depriving me of oxygen, in the manner of starvation by merely depriving me of sustenance, it would be a peaceful and efficient way to go, and certainly quicker than starvation.
• Drowning – Assuming a compassionate intent to attend to the partly dead person’s comfort – after all, we do surround them with pillows and such – nothing is quite as soothing and comfortable as a warm bath.  I could be lowered into a bathtub, the warm water could slowly be raised in the tub until it completely covers me, I would inhale a little of it, and then it would be over.
• Freezing – This is a possibility that removes most of the worry about the suffering that some might ascribe to the previous methods.  Even conscious people “suffering” from hypothermia aren’t aware that they are suffering.  (Judges take note: People don’t feel it, as those who’ve been rescued from the edge of death-by-freezing have testified.)  They become disoriented – if I were already partly dead presumably I would already be disoriented in the extreme – and then they slip from consciousness, and then their systems quietly shut down.  I think freezing Terri Schiavo would have been more humane than starving her.
• Buried “alive” (but in fact partly dead) – If I were partly dead but a consensus couldn’t be reached concerning my wishes, I could be placed into a coffin and lowered into a grave where any of the foregoing consequences could take place and no one ever need know which one succeeded.
• Bleeding – If I’m already partly dead and my heart and lungs haven’t the good sense to shut down, this may be my first choice of a way to go.  It would be quick, and it would not need to be messy.  I’ve already donated roughly 80 units of blood in my “life”time, and this would be a way of donating ten or so more units of good blood under a controlled collection process.  Then someone else who is not already partly dead but in need of more blood could be prevented from becoming partly dead.  If I’ve reached 90 donated units before I become partly or legally dead, then finishing me off in this manner would help me earn the coveted 100-unit pin!
• Cremation – The opposite of freezing.  This has its advantages because it not only makes one completely dead but also completely resolves the secondary debate about what to do with the remains.  I frankly reject this solution for myself anyway, because I cannot accept that I wouldn’t feel it.  Cremation, however, would be my disposal of choice once I am completely, 100% dead dead.  I am concerned that there isn’t enough land to keep burying people and pets and plastic.  Take the pressure off the land and burn me up.
• Natural disposal – A very simple solution used by aboriginal Americans, according to pre-PC literature on the American Indians.  My partly dead body could be placed onto a platform high above the ground, out of sight of people who might find it distasteful to accidentally glance upon the scene, and the crows and vultures and other hungry creatures of nature could each carry part of me away.  Digested in this manner, it would be nearly as efficient as cremation.  And anyone who wants a souvenir of me wouldn’t have to settle for a lock of my hair.  There are about 206 bones in the body, enough for all my friends to have one after they’ve been cleaned of the fleshy parts over a couple of weeks of exposure to nature.  I don’t think being picked apart in the manner would annoy me.  In fact, if I’m sufficiently disoriented, it might tickle.
• Lethal injection – This would be fine but probably wouldn’t be approved by any court because it’s too much like punishment.
• Assisted suicide – This is an option under certain circumstances.  If I am partly dead, (dead enough to be put to death under a court order but too weak to protest that I didn't commit any crime worthy of execution), but still marginally conscious and able to manipulate something, I might want to go this way.  The type of contraption that would make this effective would depend on my residual voluntary abilities at that point and is beyond the scope of this discussion.

ABOUT CITIZENSHIP AND ABOUT LIFE
There is but one matter left to consider.  Whatever the outcome of a national debate, and before it has been decided, it simply makes sense that each of us should prepare a living will.  I have one, and it authorizes the same people who would decide whether to sustain me by artificial means, upon deciding not to, the option to then authorize the removal of parts of my body, through legitimate medical channels, to be used so that someone else can live.

For it is life which I revere.  I understand that just living through one day at a time may be difficult for some, can stink really.  Suck even.  I can’t invoke spiritual, religious, or cosmic arguments here.  Even though I am guided by an authority above myself, I assume that authority only over myself.  When I assume that authority over you also, you have the same right to rebel that I have if you projected some alien authority over me.  More religious people are logical than logical people are religious, and it is the intensely logical people who seem most not to understand what the big deal is about Terri Schiavo.  I don’t condemn those who don’t understand.  I appeal to their logic.

Terri Schiavo, whatever she was – woman or vegetable – was a citizen of the U.S.A.  She was executed at a judge’s order, and not by lethal injection or some other humane means but by starvation and dehydration, which, if inflicted upon a criminal would be condemned as a cruel and unusual punishment.  She was sentenced to death without a criminal charge, a trial, or a conviction.  What was done to her cannot legally or ethically be done to a disobedient dog.  As a disabled person without a voice, she apparently had forfeited her rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.  One might have supposed that the ADA, a federal act which presumably, until Terri Schiavo, applied equally to all U.S. citizens, confers the right to remain disabled indefinitely.  That it does not is perhaps the most frightening implication of this event to those of us who care for the severely disabled.

It initially astonished me that those charged with carrying out the sentence didn’t protest en masse and invite the judge to come clamp her off himself, if that was his order.

I want to be charitable toward Michael Schiavo.  He had tried to do the right thing for his disabled wife all these years and even, I heard, studied nursing and took time off to nurse her himself.  Eventually he wanted out, and the history of the case shows that there have been earlier attempts to do away with the nuisance that Terri had become.  He knew that there is a conventional way to dump a wife you don’t want to stay with, and that is divorce.  (There was some mumbling in the media that Florida made that difficult for him.  So what prevented him from dragging her to Georgia?)  There is an unconventional way, and that is murder.  And for him, because Terri was a unique burden, there came a new, convenient way.

Never mind the accusations that it wasn’t until seven years after she uttered it that he mentioned his wife’s wish not to be kept on life support if anything tragic ever happened.  Never mind the insinuation that it was the cash from a malpractice settlement that motivated him to want her dead rather than divorced.  Never mind the other woman and the second family he started.  It comes to this: For whatever reason, he wanted his wife out of the picture.  Instead of divorcing her, getting on with his life, and letting Terri get on with hers – and who would have blamed him? – he found an accomplice in a judge and a law that could be twisted around her feeding tube, choking it off.

Is this how we all want to be treated?  And is this the sort of decision we want to inflict upon our families, whether parents, children, or spouses, when we have become burdensome and they have come to the end of their endurance with us?

What defines life and therefore citizenship and therefore protection under the law is not something to leave to the politicians.  The politicians get the second and third parts of it, but the first part, the very definition of life, must come from something deeper than politics and also something more rational than religion.  It must be found in the soul of our culture and must be plain to all of us, or else none of us is safe.  We must debate it and we must decide.

©David A. Woodbury, 31 March 2005