What Motivates the Tube-Pullers?

Those in the country who have lately been derided for supporting life in Florida are accused have harboring some right-wing agenda. We grit our teeth and deal with it because it's not worth the argument. The bottom line is that what makes so many people emotionally attached to this case is a reverence and respect for innocent life.

Peggy Noonan analyzes what drives the passion of those folks that are so determined to see someone die.

Everyone who has written in defense of Mrs. Schiavo's right to live has received e-mail blasts full of attacks that appear to have been dictated by the unstable and typed by the unhinged. On Democratic Underground they crowed about having "kicked the sh-- out of the fascists." On Tuesday James Carville's face was swept with a sneer so convulsive you could see his gums as he damned the Republicans trying to help Mrs. Schiavo. It would have seemed demonic if he weren't a buffoon.

Why are they so committed to this woman's death?

They seem to have fallen half in love with death.

What does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them?

In an attempt to grasp how the minds of some of these people work, Noonan ponders the following:

I do not understand why people who want to save the whales (so do I) find campaigns to save humans so much less arresting. I do not understand their lack of passion. But the save-the-whales people are somehow rarely the Stop stop-abortion-please people.

The PETA people, who say they are committed to ending cruelty to animals, seem disinterested in the fact of late-term abortion, which is a cruel procedure performed on a human.

I do not understand why the don't-drill-in-Alaska-and-destroy-its-prime-beauty people do not join forces with the don't-end-a-life-that-holds-within-it-beauty people.

I do not understand why those who want a freeze on all death penalty cases in order to review each of them in light of DNA testing--an act of justice and compassion toward those who have been found guilty of crimes in a court of law--are uninterested in giving every last chance and every last test to a woman whom no
one has ever accused of anything.

For our children, raised in a time where abortion and euthanasia is celebrated and kids can casually walk up to schoolmates, smile and pull the trigger, the value of life seems to be constantly defined downward and seeing these events play out on television will likely only reinforce this process. Noonan considers the possible path this can take.

Once you "know" that--that human life is not so special after all--then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.

I share her inability to understand these folks as well. As with any of her writing, the column should be read in its entirety.

Posted by: Gary at 06:57 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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