A Florida judge has now turned down Jeb Bush and the latest attempt to short-circuit a string of legislative judgements allowing Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube to be removed.
Is this case finally at the end of the line — or are there more surprises from politicians (or some kind of new legal case) to come? The latest:
A Florida state judge on Thursday rejected a petition by the state welfare agency to take custody of brain-damaged Florida woman Terri Schiavo, a move that would have led to her feeding tube being restored.
Circuit Judge George Greer, who has handled a bitter seven-year legal dispute over Schiavo’s fate, said a request to intervene by the state’s Department of Children and Families appeared to be brought solely “for the purpose of circumventing the court’s final judgment.)
A non-legalistic reaction to that: DUHH…More:
Greer, who ordered Schiavo’s feeding tube removed last Friday, also rejected a request from Schiavo’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, for the tube to be restored based on what they said was new evidence from a neurologist contradicting his court’s finding that she is in a persistent vegetative state.
The parents’ options to keep their 41-year-old daughter alive were all but closed on Thursday when the U.S. Supreme Court denied their appeal to order feeding resumed, and when Greer issued his ruling. State courts have consistently sided with Schiavo’s husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, in finding she would not want to live in this condition.
Short of kidnapping her from her bed or coming up with some kind of pretext to toss her husband in jail — none of which would be likely to stem the severe damage this has already inflicted on Congressional Republicans and the White House, by the way — it’s hard to see what new twist can be down the pike.
But, then, we’ve been surprised before……..
UPDATE: Barely did we press the FINISH button here on our wonderful hosting agent Powerblogs when John Cole ran THIS. So the courts matter little to these people; they’re basically now advocating Florida in effect be turned into a police state because the ruling didn’t go their way. And it isn’t bad enough that they’ve repudiated Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, now they’re equating this to the civil rights struggle. (You won’t be able to sleep tonight due to the noise of Goldwater, Reagan AND Martin Luther King, Jr. rolling over in their graves…)
UPDATE II: Tales Of A Wandering Mind thinks people who say that want to keep Schiavo alive aren’t truly putting themsevles in her shoes. He lays out what everything may look like from that perspective adding:
Now, I am sure there are people out there who have those “use every means to keep me alive no matter what and for however long” blocks checked in their Living Wills. And although I don’t think there are that many, at least those people carry some weight when they argue for keeping Terri alive because they truly believe there is hope for her — just like they believe there is hope for them if they are in her situation.
But if you are not one of those people, who are you to say that she should suffer what you are not willing to suffer? How can you argue that she lay there year after year hoping for escape when you are not willing to do the same?
On the other hand, there is a perspective that is getting lost in all of this: it’s the perspective of disability rights. They have a completely different viewpoint on what Schiavo faces and how this debate is framed.
To find out more, check out Not Dead Yet and Ragged Edge Online. Both consider the Schiavo case above all an issue of disability rights. Here’s a taste from the beginning of one post:
MAR 23, 2005– As legal appeals are exhausted in the case of Terri Schiavo, the long-term issue, say disability groups, is whether guardians should “have carte blanche to starve and dehydrate” people with conditions like hers.
Sen. Tom Harkin ‘s (D. IA) effort in Congress last week to produce a wider bill was typical of the role he’s played for disabled people during his years in Congress.
The Democratic Senator from Iowa, perhaps more than any other member of Congress, has worked diligently for disability rights over the decades, and seems to have no problem understanding that the matter of Terri Schiavo is nothing so much as a disability rights issue.
“The more I looked at the Schiavo case, the more I thought, ‘Wait a minute. There are a lot of people in similar situations — maybe not in her specific situation — but because of a disability cannot express themselves or cannot in any way make their desires known,'” he told reporters yesterday. “So it seems to me like this would be an appropriate area for us to take a look at.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.