Down memory lane

Reading about Randall Terry's involvement in the Terri Schiavo tragedy as family spokesman for the Schindlers, a role he took up at their request (which, I can't help but suspect, says something unpleasant about them), brought to mind something I wrote about him in the print version of Lotus. So flashback to July, 1992:

Randall Terry, Executive Director of Operation Rescue, has been reported to be carrying around an aborted fetus in a jar of liquid, intending to push it at "pro-abortion" politicians.

If Terry actually believes, as he claims, that a fetus is a child, why hasn't he given this particular child a decent burial? Why is he carrying a dead baby around in a jar? If, on the other hand, he sees no need for such a burial, how can he claim it’s a child?

I'll leave it to Terry's conscience to decide whether he's a creepy ghoul or a foul hypocrite - but by his actions he clearly must be one or the other.

I guess it's true that some things - and some people - never change.

Footnote One: Not surprisingly, Jon Stewart found a way to point up the absurdity of the "debate." The link to the video clip is found here at Crooks and Liars; the direct link to the video in Quicktime format is here.

Footnote Two: It may seem cruel to judge the emotional pain of others as if all such decisions were coldly rational, but I can't help but be struck by the fact that Robert Schindler, Terri's father, had previously made the decision to remove his mother's life support.

She was 79 at the time[, reported the Guardian (UK), for November 4, 2003], and had been ill with pneumonia for a week, when her kidneys gave out. "I can remember like yesterday the doctors said she had a good life. I asked, 'If you put her on a ventilator does she have a chance of surviving, of coming out of this thing?'" Robert says. "I was very angry with God because I didn't want to make those decisions."

It makes it hard to understand why he has no sympathy for someone else making the same decision under even clearer circumstances.

Footnote Three: On the other hand, I have no compunction about noting that the March 27 Los Angeles Times tells how in 1988, that arch-hypocrite Tom DeLay, who called removal of the feeding tube "an act of barbarism,"

quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father[, who was in a coma after a bizarre accident, kept alive by intravenous lines and oxygen equipment,] die.

"There was no point to even really talking about it," Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old widowed mother, recalled in an interview last week. "There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew - we all knew - his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."

Oh, but this case is very, very different, his aides say. Certainly: There were no votes to be gotten from his father's death, no fanatics to pander to. It's very different.