Schiavo as Prologue

The Terri Schiavo case was no sideshow. As her parents' legal appeals failed repeatedly, as protests and press conferences wound into what was almost certainly the final phase of sorrow, recrimination and relief, the entire episode might have seemed a bizarre, media-driven distraction from pressing issues of war and the economy. In fact, the case goes to the heart of political choices confronting the country.

For leaders of the Christian right, the case was only their most recent attempt to elevate to the level of national crusade issues like gay unions and abstinence-only sex education. Each invokes moral alarm (the morality determined by the self-righteous) against considered, scientifically informed public policy, and each involves a demand for state intrusion into well-established zones of privacy and civil rights. Each also serves as a surrogate issue for a movement whose main target is abortion rights--rights that retain overwhelming public support. Antiabortion fanatics who preened before the Pinellas Park press corps were not so much speaking to the general public as raising the temperature of their own faithful.

The Schiavo case would probably have remained marginal but for the 2003 intervention of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who pushed through his state legislature the same kind of attack on unanimous Schiavo court rulings that Tom DeLay and the White House would later try at the federal level. The Bush clan takes on no issue without political calculation, and here the math was precise. The religious right remembers well that grandfather Prescott Bush was Planned Parenthood's best friend in the Senate and that father George H.W. Bush was staunchly pro-choice up to the moment of his selection as Ronald Reagan's running mate. Neither Bush brother ever misses a chance to prove his Christian-right allegiance. Just ten months after Jeb's unsuccessful intervention in the Schiavo case, the votes and phone banks of Florida's Christian right helped to determine a national election. DeLay, whose own family once made a life-ending decision like Michael Schiavo's about DeLay's father, now panders to the same constituency to save his own skin.

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