Tom McMahon

Next Time It Will Be Easier

From National Review:

Why not kill Mrs. Schiavo quickly and efficiently, by depriving her of air to breathe? In principle, that would have been no different from denying her the other basic necessities of life. Why not give her a lethal injection? The law would not have allowed those methods; but the reason nobody advocated them was that they would have been too obviously murder. So the court-ordered killing was carried out slowly, incrementally, over days and weeks, with soft music, stuffed animals, and euphonious slogans about choice and dignity and radiance. By the time it ended, no one really remembered how many days and hours it had gone on. The nation accepted it, national polls supported it, and we all moved on to other things.

Next time it will be easier. It always is. The tolerance of early-term abortion made it possible to tolerate partial-birth abortion, and to give advanced thinkers a hearing when they advocate outright infanticide. Letting the courts decide such life-and-death issues made it possible for us to let them decide others, made it seem somehow wrong for anyone to stand in their way. Now they are helping to snuff out the minimally conscious. Who's next?

I kept asking this exact same question of the pro-death supporters and I never got a straight answer from any one of them either.

The Essence of Civilization

From Best of the Web:

This morning President Bush offered his condolences to the family of Terri Schiavo:

The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life.

"The strong have a duty to protect the weak": Didn't that use to be a liberal sentiment? To be sure, some prominent left-liberals--Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Sen. Tom Harkin--joined the effort to save Mrs. Schiavo, and 47 House Democrats out of 100 voted in favor of the law that would have done so had the courts not defied it. But it seems clear that liberalism is not as compassionate as it once was.

Introducing McMahon's Law

Here, for the first time anywhere, I present to you McMahon's Law:

Whenever a blogger posts at length about a hateful e-mail he has received instead of responding to the legitimate arguments advanced by the other side, that blogger has lost the debate.

Here's a generalized example of how I have seen this played out over and over on the web:

1. The Blogger asserts His Viewpoint on The Issue of the Day.
2. The Opposition responds, and the usual back-and-forth ensues for a couple of rounds.
3. The Blogger is unable to respond to the strongest points made by The Opposition, and is starting to lose the debate.
4. It will be at this point that The Blogger will reveal in a very lengthy post that he has received hateful e-mails from members of The Opposition. Generally, these hateful e-mails will disparage The Blogger's puppy, sick child, or dead beloved parent/grandparent.
5. Immediately The Supporters of The Blogger will flood the post with comments about what a Wonderful Person The Blogger is, and how Evil the members of The Opposition are.
6. The Blogger will then respond in kind, telling The Supporters what Wonderful People they are, and then revealing some heretofore unmentioned Wonderful Quality about the Puppy, Sick Child, or Dead Grandmother.
7. Immediately The Supporters of The Blogger will flood the post with another round of comments about what a Wonderful Person The Blogger is, and how Evil the members of The Opposition are.
8. The Blogger will then mention how traumatized he has been by the hateful e-mail sent by The Opposition.
9. The Supporters will then offer ritual forgiveness of The Opposition, admonishing them with some biblical phrase about Not Judging People.
10. If a member of The Opposition attempts to re-start the debate, this is immediately trumped by comments of the "Haven't You People Done Enough Already To The Poor, Traumatized Blogger?" variety.
11. The whole thing winds down, with The Supporters pleased at what Wonderful People they are. The arguments advanced by The Opposition are never addressed.

Sound familiar? What a bunch of crud. If You Can't Stand The Heat, Stay Out Of The Kitchen. Weird, odd, or hateful e-mails and comments are just part of the territory when you blog on controversial topics -- I get that kind of stuff all the time. Everybody does. It's like comment spam or offers from Nigerian banks. It's the stuff you brush off, not something you use when you don't have an effective rebuttal. And from this point on, anyone who does this will have forfeited their debate to their opposition. Clear enough?

Mugs-A-Plenty: Pray For Terri

Mugs-A-Plenty: Pray For Terri

Indeed.

The Spiritual Health of Nations

From Dennis Boyles:

If you ask me, the widespread grieving for Terri Schiavo is not only an indicator of the political significance of moral values but also a barometer of the nation's spiritual health. Did people go too far to try to pretzel-twist the judicial process and cheek-slap states' right? Maybe — but I don't think so, and anyway that's not the point. The alternative to being passionately engaged with the terrible fate of Terri Schiavo is to mutter a few words about how "sad and tragic" it all is and just move on. That's certainly what the New York Times and most Europeans would like to see. However, in the grim arc of two lifetimes, we've seen very often what happens when you shrug off one death, let alone many, many more. In fact, we saw it in France, where all those enlightened rationalists live, less than two years ago when 15,000 weak and elderly men and women were left to die in a summer heat wave while government services shut down and their families all went on holiday.

By the end of August 2003, 15,000 French people had died of simple neglect. That's the equivalent of five 9/11s in four months. One such event is all it took to transform America. In France, massive death received a massive shrug. I've reported this before, of course, but I still can't get over it: As a result of what happened during those awful weeks, nothing changed.

The Myth of the 19 Judges

From Thomas Sowell:

When a case goes up to a higher court on appeal, the issue before the appellate court is not whether they agree with the merits of the decision of the lower court. In a criminal case, for example, the issue before the appellate court is not whether the defendant was guilty or innocent, but whether the trial was conducted properly.

In other words, the defendant is not supposed to be tried again at the appellate level. So, no matter how many appellate judges rule one way or the other, that tells you absolutely nothing about the fundamental question of guilt or innocence.

Similar principles apply in a civil case, such as that of Terri Schiavo. Liberals can count all the judges they want, but that does not mean that all these judges agreed with the merits of the original court's decision. It means that they found no basis for saying that the original court's decision was illegal.

I'm Kind of Afraid To Get Up These Mornings

Will the First Blast of News be that Terri Schiavo has died? Not to-day, I guess. Will it be tomorrow? The next day? The day after that?

Anybody else have this fear?

People Make Their Own Quality of Life

From Orson Scott Card:

People make their own quality of life. There are people who are desperately unhappy in the midst of freedom and plenty, and people who are quite cheerful despite devastating deprivation and loss.

My wife was once at a gathering of church women, when one of them started complaining about how desperately hard it was to choose just the right dining room set for her new home. She seemed genuinely distressed. And the other ladies commiserated. But my wife knew that one of the women was suffering through the breakup of her marriage, and another was worried because her husband was probably going to be laid off. Every one of them had problems that made choosing a dining room set almost laughably trivial.

But to that one woman, the dining room problem was the worst thing in her life. It’s as if she had a certain amount of misery she was determined to feel, and settled on whatever came to hand to be miserable about.

March Madness

March Madness

(via My View of the World)

The Law Exists to Serve Mankind

From Clayton Cramer:

What should be the goal of law? I would argue that the goal of law should be justice. As an example, the law prohibits stealing--and yet few people raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition would punish a starving man for stealing a loaf of bread to feed himself and his family. (In practice, this is almost unheard of--I have only once seen someone steal food.) In this respect, both "result-oriented" liberals and "result-oriented" conservatives share a common perspective that justice is the goal, not the mechanical functioning of the legal process.

I would argue that there is nothing just about killing a woman simply on the word of her husband, who has reasons to want her dead, apart from his supposed concern for Terri's welfare. Recast this situation in domestic violence terms, and watch how quickly liberals would be justly angry at allowing Michael Schiavo to beat his wife.

Now, I understand that law is necessarily an imperfect attempt at justice, and I agree that there are going to be situations where following legal procedures exactly is going to produce unjust results. But the sentiments of Instapundit, and many others, seem a little more concerned about the following of legal procedure, and not enough concerned about the injustice of the results. The law exists to serve mankind, not the other way around.