2005-03-27 - 11:27 a.m.
It's not spring if it was snowing on Thursday

Random free associations, from LunaNina:

1. I’m waiting:: Get into the groove, boy, you've got to prove, your love to meeeee. On the first Madonna album I ever owned, True Blue.

2. Speak:: now or forever hold thy peace.

3. Roger...:: Jen. (Jen is a former housemate, Roger her boyfriend.)

4. Knock knock:: Banana who?

5. Hybrid:: Car.

6. Can’t believe my eyes:: That horrible Damien Rice song, which consists of him wailing "Can't take my eyes offa you" forty-nine times.

7. Hooked:: on phonics. (I HATED phonics. We did page after page of them in Catholic school.)

8. Pontificate:: It's impossible for me to hear this word and not think of the pontiff. Which probably is supposed to be capitalized.

9. Slime:: Who you gonna call? (The answer, of course, being Ghostbusters.)

10. Unwelcome:: sexual advances. (I just came off of a whole month of reading harassment cases, thank you very much.)
    

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The only reason I am even thinking twice (well, a lot more than twice) about the Schiavo case is because I know the disability community, or at least certain disability activists, are very, very much against the legalization of assisted suicide. The group best known for this position is Not Dead Yet. Here is a quote from their latest press release:

People on the right are killing us slowly with cuts to the budget and Medicaid while the people on the left kill us quickly and call it 'compassion' -- either way we end up dead -- AND WE OBJECT.

Of course this isn't exactly about assisted suicide. And yet in some ways, this is precisely what the debate is about. About assumptions being made in the name of someone else who is incapacitated because of her disability. About non-disabled people making assumptions about which health problems render someone without redemption from a medical perspective. This article makes the very interesting argument that people who talk about dying "with dignity" do so with a prejudiced perspective on what "with dignity" means.

I'm not sure I agree with anyone on this.

I happened to catch a few minutes of Meet the Press this morning, ostensibly a panel on Faith in America. Terri Schiavo came up about thirty seconds in. Tim Russert showed footage of the many different judges involved in this case, offering background on each, who had appointed whom, etc. Judge Greer, the Florida state judge now famous for presiding over this case, was described by Russert as a Southern Baptist. The panelist from the Southern Baptist Convention immediately huffed that Judge Greer was no longer a Southern Baptist, having been removed from the rolls of his Clearwater church "by mutual agreement." Whatever that might mean.

It would be impossible for the Rehnquist Court to uphold the Constitutionality of what Congress did without going back on the strongly states'-rights, neo-Federalist record it has established. Which is another reason why this is interesting. But it's not nearly as interesting as who Michael is sleeping with now, or where the money from the malpractice suit has gone, or whether or not Terri is going to get to have Last Rites, or whether or not she is really smiling.

What's scary here is the thought that I may be on the same side as the militant shoot-'em-up anti-abortionists.

I'm going with a militant agnostic approach on this. I don't know the answer, but you don't either.

woogie - woo