Author: Ophelia Benson

And another thing.

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient’s family’s wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother’s wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

I didn’t know that until I read it on a blog. It doesn’t surprise me – of course Bush would sign a law like that. What else would he do, support ‘socialized medicine’? That would take away the whole point of being rich, talentless, lazy, and well-connected. It doesn’t surprise me, but it does disgust me that little bit more. All that sanctimony – that crap about the presumption in favour of life. What did he do, whisper so softly that the mikes didn’t pick it up ‘if you have the money, that is‘? Mark Kleiman has more.

I know. Why’s she so quiet all of a sudden? you’ve been thinking. What’s the deal? Did something very heavy sit on her or what? Has she gone prancing off on a trip again? Is she at the mall shopping for new spring outfits? Getting her hair done? Training for a marathon? In prison? What?

Since it’s not as if I fall silent in the normal course of things, is it. No. No, it’s none of those, just a death struggle with my computer. So I finally shot it (I had to) and got a new one. Which means I have to go from three meals of cat food a day to two, for the rest of my life – either that or get an actual paying job, and we wouldn’t want me to do that, now would we.

So I’m not going to say a lot about it, because I gather the right-wing talking heads have pretty much talked themselves into puddles of exhausted steam doing so. But I do want to say just one thing. It’s this business of ‘only God can decide.’

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, on Monday condemned the withdrawal of the feeding tube, saying only God can decide whether a person should live or die. “Who can judge the dignity and sacredness of the life of a human being, made in the image and likeness of God? Who can decide to pull the plug as if we were talking about a broken or out-of-order household appliance?” the paper said in a commentary. A year ago, Pope John Paul II said that feeding and hydrating a patient in a persistive vegetative state was “morally obligatory” and called withdrawal of feeding tubes “euthanasia by omission.”

Thus illustrating yet again why one doesn’t turn to god-botherers for clarity of thought. I mean…if only ‘God’ can decide whether a person should live or die, then Terri Schiavo died fifteen years ago, remember? As did a great, great many of the rest of us and our parents and grandparents and so on. If only God can decide then we’re not supposed to do anything, right? Somebody has a fever, an infected cut, TB, cholera, tetanus, whatever – we’re supposed to just let God do what it will. Or else we’re not – but then the Vatican doesn’t get to pick arbitrary points where we’re obliged to let the deity do the deciding. Either humans intervene all along the way or they don’t.

This business about the appliance. The Vatican newspaper seems to think this God of theirs issued Schiavo with a feeding tube – a special feeding tube, apparently, that materialized only after she’d had the brain damage. But it must have looked to bystanders as if humans were involved with the appearance of the feeding tube. So why couldn’t it work the other way? This God of theirs dematerializes the feeding tube, and to bystanders it looks as if humans are involved in the process but in fact it’s the deity doing it all. That makes just as much sense as the other version, in which humans are perfectly entitled to perform medical interventions, they’re just not permitted to decide to end them when (actually, long after) it’s clear that the upper cortex has been destroyed.

And what is all this crap about compassion. (Oh look, I said I would only say one thing. But – oh well, two then.) Compassion. Is it. Is that why sane people are so filled with dread? Is that why we’re all imagining ourselves lying around like department store mannequins, bodies without minds, propped up like dolls, dead but still kept hanging around? Right to life my ass. It’s not right to life, it’s no right to death.

I try to be reasonable (sometimes) but this country looks like such a loony bin these days. It scares me.

Okay, I know I’m being bad. But some nonsense is just so nonsensical it just cries out for it. ‘And if the children cry out for rebuke shall we walk on the other side?’ I bet you don’t know what part of the Bible that’s from. Neither do I.

Anyway. They’re schlepping around with their tongues hanging out, begging us to laugh at them. So let’s laugh at them. First let’s laugh at Jesus-sniffing.

You can find candles with just about every fragrance imaginable, from blueberry to ocean mist to hot apple pie. Now there’s a candle that lets you experience the scent of Jesus, and they’ve been selling out by the case…”You can’t see him and you can’t touch him,” says Bob Tosterud. “This is a situation where you may be able to sense him by smelling. And it provides a really new dimension to one’s experience with Jesus.”

Next let’s laugh at the hilarious idea of a Catholic cardinal worried that people will believe lies and fables and things that aren’t true not nohow.

Mr Arcolao confirmed that the cardinal told an Italian newspaper: “It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies.”
The archbishop told Il Giornale: “The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true.”

The book is everywhere! The president of the US has a group to study it every day in the White House! The Gideons give it away free in motels so that everyone will have one! Oh, wait, that’s a different book with fables in it. Still, it’s good that the cardinal is so vigilant, isn’t it.

And then there’s all the risible (and rather disgusting) drivel from the French Jesus-sniffers. (What price laïcité eh.)

The display was ruled “a gratuitous and aggressive act of intrusion on people’s innermost beliefs”, by a judge…Italy’s advertising watchdog said the ad’s use of Christian symbols including a dove and a chalice recalled the foundations of the faith and would offend the sensitivity of part of the population…”When you trivialise the founding acts of a religion, when you touch on sacred things, you create an unbearable moral violence which is a danger to our children,” said lawyer Thierry Massis.

So they can’t even tease doves and chalices? The Church has a monopoly even on them? So…if I say rude unkind things to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square next time I’m mincing and plodding around central London, and some little tiny Catholic children on their way to the National Gallery under the protection of their teacher overhear me – what will happen to me? Will I be extradited to France for punishment? Yet another thing to worry about.

And finally there’s an item that isn’t actually funny, but quite…blood-chilling. Eugene Volokh, whom I never read but whom I’m always seeing linked to and quoted as a rare example of the reasonable, rational conservative. Saying some very strange things.

I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging…I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

That ‘but’ after ‘I like civilization’ is interesting. Sometimes a ‘but’ can say such a lot.