Terry Schaivo and Issues of State Approved 'Mercy Killings'

Gary C Gibson - 11:00am Mar 22, 2005 EDT (#355 of 357) Reason and faith can discover a cosmic structure fit for rational parameters subject unto God's moral law.

Modern medical science has enabled the phenomena of retrograde acceptance by the state of homicide in select instances. Its method may be permissiveness such as Pontius Pilate and the Federal Judge enacted today or perhaps one day also in actual dispatching of an 'agent of mercy' to terminate a life deemed superfluous.

Its a 'Brave New World' circumstances in which a new synthetic form of homicide gets a foot in the door of the bastion of civil rights as the ten commandements and the instruction of 'thou shalt not kill' is set aside farther from the public domain. An addition of the right to kill life-extended individuals with alleged low levels of brain activity known as 'vegetables' or 'hamburgers'to the corpus of U.S. common law with the execution by starvation of Terry Schaivo is an evil back-door means to inject corrupt circumstantial ethics into the expanding realm of bio-technologically enhanced lives and the many substantial social issues without competent review, recognition,deliberation and response by philosophically educated/cogitating members of Congress.

Presently it is generally considered criminal to commit homicide on any human being.Excluding Terry Schaivo from that principle is a substantive departure from tradition and general moral prohibitions against homicide that should not be accepted through judicial activism and quankery. Some have raised the issue of the matter of Terry Schaivo's own will in the circumstance; Does anyone actually know what that was presumably 15 years ago before she was injured? Can it be certain that she might not have changed her opinion since, if she could form an opinion?

In divorce cases the testimony of just one spouse cannot generally be considered sufficient for a true portrait of the issue. Homicide is a more serious issue than a divorce, and the testimony of a spouse cannot be taken as a valid representation of the pre-injury will of a victim in the absence of corroborative evidence I should think. When the laws are corrupted to allow individual circumstances to slip through, the practice does not go unnoticed by corrupting elements in the social environment. Where loopholes in law are created the unscrupulous will exploit it.

The effort to have all memebers of society on an equal legal footing is one of the perennial challenges to any society seeking democracy. The United States has no certainty that it's many immigrants here for economic reasons often happy to return home periodically to their own nation, and it's many comfortable citizens have a thirst for a liberal democracy and social justice that respects property rights and the right to life of each individual citizen.

Congress should legislate a protocol of examining and processing each case or request for the homicide of any citizen designated as meriting a death sentence if it must accept the onerous and dubiously moral practice at all. Standards of investigating all parties involved, and of the merits and need to request death for someone else whom is an invalid, should be formed and applied in each case. The records should be permanently maintained and available to public scrutiny. I should offer the opinion that an annulment of marriage should occur automatically to any spouse that does not oppose it after 5 years of certifiable brain death or 'vegetable status'. Prospective long-term vegetables should receive a certification as vegetables within 6 months after entry into that physcial condition. An annulment is appropriate because the conditions for marriage have disappeared through no-fault of either spouse. ...

Gary C Gibson - 11:01am Mar 22, 2005 EDT (#356 of 357) Reason and faith can discover a cosmic structure fit for rational parameters subject unto God's moral law.The value of creating a protocol for treating the issues of severly brain-damaged patients should be a no-brainer for Congress. Yet there are many derivative social philosophical issues involved and more that could arise such. What about individuals with no relatives that become so incapacitated? Would the state decide when to kill them? The preferred alternative is to work for life and not death, to prevent injury and harm and to search for peaceful and descent remedies to suffering. Terry Schaibo isn't suffering, and at least three of her family members have voted for her continuing existence, what is wrong with that, and how can a federal judge obstruct the right of anyone to continue living and block the replugging in of a life-support apparatus?