Life For Me But Death For Thee

Matthew Yglesias praises this excellent article on the l'affaire Schiavo by Mark Kleinman which contrasts the media frenzy over the Schiavo case with the lack of coverage of the Sun Hudson and Spiro Nikolouzos cases.

Sun Hudson, a six-month-old boy with a
fatal congenital disease, died Thursday
after a Texas hospital, over his mother's
objections, withdrew his feeding tube.
[...] The hospital simply decided that it
had better things to do than keeping the
child alive, and the Texas courts upheld
that decision after the penniless mother
failed, during the 10-day window
provided for by Texas law, to find another
institution willing to take the child.

Sun Hudson is dead, but 68-year-old Spiro
Nikolouzos is still alive, thanks to an
emergency appeals court order issued
yesterday. However, his life support
could be cut off at any moment.

Both of these cases took places in Texas, where Governor George W. Bush signed the Texas Futile Care Law into effect in 1999. This law gives the medical institution the right to end "futile care."

As Markos points out today on the front page of DailyKos.com, "Bush's rhetoric on the 'culture of life' and 'erring on the side of life' have galvanized anti death penalty activists, who are reminding people of Bush's record of death in Texas.

"In cases like this one, where there are
serious questions and substantial doubts,
our society, our laws and our courts
should have a presumption in favor of life,"
said Bush, who has spoken often of creating
a "culture of life" by limiting such things as
abortion and stem cell research.

Death penalty opponents said Bush did not
give the same presumption to death row
inmates in Texas, where he used his power
to grant an execution stay only once while
governor from 1995 to 2000.

In 2000, the state set a U.S. record with 40
executions, including that of Gary Graham,
whose guilt was hotly contested and became
an international controversy.

The stench of the hypocrisy is overwhelming. First, right wing Christian conservatives like Bush and Delay are perfectly happy to talk about the sanctity of life except when it concerns the State executing someone. Second, the same Republican Senators who voted to pass "Terry's Law" to put the Schiavo case before a federal judge previously had voted to slash Medicaid spending and make bankruptcies more difficult for families faced with the huge financial bills a catastrophic medical emergency (like in theTerry Schiavo, Sun Hudson and Spiro Nikolouzos cases) can produce. Third, after professing for years the desire to limit the scale and reach of the federal government until it is "small enough to drown in the bathtub" (Grover Norquist), the Republican majority passed a federal law explicitly limited to the rights of a single individual to get a feeding tube inserted in a particular Florida hospital room. Absolutely Orwellian, as billmon notes: "All patients on life support are equal, some are less equal than others."