From The Mail Bag

From an email I received yesterday:

Terri Schiavo has been dead for fifteen years, I submit keeping her alive without a brain is tantamount to torture. Now I am aware that the current version of the Republican Party is fine with the idea of torture as long as it helps move along its political agenda, but that doesn’t make it right.

Interesting reasoning, if you can call it that.

My question would be: If Terri had no ability to process pain, what made keeping her alive “torture?” How do you torture someone who is either dead or “has no brain”?

This supposed argument is supremely self-defeating. If Terri was able to process pain, then she certainly wasn’t brainless and dead. And if she was not able to feel pain, then “ending her suffering” could hardly be used as a justification for killing her.

So which was it?

Her loving husband assured us that Terri couldn’t feel any pain, all the while fighting to kill her in order to “end her suffering.” The author of the above email claims to be against torture. But it seems to me that if Terri was actually capable of being tortured (as the author suggests), the thirteen days without food and water while her organs shut down certainly would have qualified.

So who was it who wound up on the side of torture here?

But this isn’t really about reasoning. Its about ridding ourselves of undesirables. We'll find reasons even if we have to invent them, and even if they make no sense.