To Cox and Forkum

As regular readers will have noticed, I've routinely used the insightful and cogent cartoons of Cox and Forkum on this page. Unfortunately, bad information and sloppy logic have placed them on the wrong side of the Schaivo affair.

I have just sent them the following email:

Gentlemen:

I am one of those who has been deeply disturbed by your coverage of the Schaivo case. Your commentary has been inaccurate as to the most basic facts, sadly misinformed, and logically very much wanting. It is not that those who disagree with you who are basing their arguments on emotion. It is rather that you are basing yours on misinformation and bad logic.

I might add- and I hope this doesn't seem patronizing- that there is a sense in which you are less to blame than you might be. The same is true of the American people generally, who have been grossly misinformed by the sloppy and selective coverage of this case by the media.

I am disturbed by the falsehood- which continues to appear on your blog, in the form of a quotation from a TIA entry- that Terry Schavio is brain dead. She is not, and even Michael Schaivo does not claim that she is. The disturbing thing is that even the most slightly attentive following of this case would readily dispel that lie, which has been repeated ad nauseum by the media all over the world. I have yet to see a retraction of this blatant inaccuracy. As I repeat, it continues to appear on your web page to this day!

I am disturbed that you do not see that because an objection is "religious" does not automatically mean that it is not valid on purely secular and logical grounds. Indeed, the if moral judgments that are religious in origin were excluded from the public square, we would have no laws against murder, rape, or armed robbery! There is a basic moral distinction between ceasing artificial life support- "pulling the plug-" and thereby allowing nature to take its course in the case of a terminally ill patient who is already in the process of dying a natural death, and causing an unnatural death by dehydration and/or starvation in a patient who is not dying! It is the difference between letting a dying person go, and killing a person who is not dying!

One need not be religious to see that this is a fundamental moral distinction. Nor need one be anything but the strictest kind of conservative to see that this distinction has been obliterated in law by a combination of an arrogant social liberalism among the medical elite (this is not simply a medical question, but an ethical one), and the usurpation of legislative authority by a judiciary which has arbitrarily obliterated that distinction at law with no imput from the legislative branch or the electorate. Of course there is a Federal issue justifying the intervention of Congress and the President here: the rape of the seperation of powers, and the emergence of an unchecked, freely-legislating judiciary!

Euthanasia and, except in Oregon, assisted suicide are supposed to be illegal in this country. Whether one agrees with those prohibitions is beside the point; the exception that you are allowed to starve non-terminal patients if you can convince a judge that the person would have wanted to be starved to death is a legal anomaly resulting purely from the decrees of an out-of-control judiciary. Neither Congress nor any legislature made that exception!

There is also Terri Schaivo's constitutional right to due process. Terri was found in 1991 to be suffering from a plethora of fractures, healed and unhealed, and other injuries consistent with repeated beatings. Among them were compression injuries consistent with strangulation- a very plausible alternative explanation of her brain damage, and one- according to forensic pathogist Dr. Michael Baden- which provides a more likely explanation of that damage than cardiac arrest due to her eating disorder.

Her husband- a man who fits the psychological profile of a wife abuser- won a large amount of money in a malpractice suit which was supposedly intended to be used to pay for Terri's medical expenses for the rest of a natural lifespan. Was it by fraud, or is he lying when he says that Terri expressed a desire to die before her injury?

Not a dime of it went for those expenses. He stubbornly refused to allow his wife rehabilitative treatment, and nurses at the facility where she was kept were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they provided it. Only after he had won the money did he supposedly "remember" that Terri had said that she didn't want to live if she were ever in such a condition. He now stands to inherit the balance of that money upon his wife's death.

This "husband" has been living in an adulterous relationship with another woman, who has born him two children, for years. All husbandly ties with Terri have been long since broken. He can remarry if Terri is dead. Michael Schaivo has several different conflicts of interest, any one of which should have disqualified him as Terri's guardian. Nor is he a particularly credible witness in view of his legal track record. Yet this is the man who was given Terri's guardianship, and she is dying on only the basis of his word that this is what she wants.

Judge Greer has systematically refused to listen to medical experts whose testimony contradicts that of the ones presented by Michael Schaivo's attorneys, and initially appointed by the courts. No fewer than thirty medical doctors, including ten neurologists, have diagnosed Terri as not being in a persistant vegetative state. But their evidence simply doesn't count, because it doesn't fit the findings of the doctors whose testimony Judge Greer first heard.

Nor does the deference of appellate courts to Judge Greer as the finder of fact mean that they have sided with him on questions of fact. Rather, they have seen these as outside their juristiction, as appellate courts traditionally do.

No reasonable person would find the claim that Terri ever expressed a wish to die convincing, given that the only evidence for it comes from a man who stands to gain from her death. Judge Greer has excluded all evidence to the contrary, and even disallowed pleas for CAT scans and other more objective tests that would determine the degree of Terri's actual brain damage.This dying woman has not had due process- and the Constitution explicitly mandates the Federal government to guarantee that right.

Gentlemen, I assume that you are philosophically wrong on the questions of euthanasia and assisted suicide. But you are clearly wrong as to the most basic facts of this case. Nor is this simply a question of disagreeing with you on an occasional issue. The issue of the integrity of the seperation of powers and the right to due process, as well as of the limits we, as a society, place on human say-so over matters of life and death, are very appropriate subjects for the political arena- and subjects so significant that, frankly, they outweigh our agreement on other issues.

I hope that you will reconsider your position, and at least remove the inaccurate information from your page and from your argument.

Sincerely,
Robert E. Waters

It will be a long time, if ever, before another Cox and Forkum cartoon appears on this blog.