Call me crazy

In an earlier, rambling post I wrote about the Schiavo spectacle, I think I missed the most disturbing thing. As I said earlier, I hadn't been paying much attention to the whole thing, as it just seemed impolite to stare. Plus I just didn't really know what the issues were.

One thing that's been nagging at me is, well, how does this fit in with everything else going on nowadays? As usual, the numbers are all there, I just haven't been adding them up. And every time I do, I feel crazy. Paranoid. Completely nuts.

Tristero, in this post, goes ahead and calls it Fascism. David Neiwert over at Orcinus is also very much on to something in his post 'Balance' and the tipping point.

I mean, what the hell? You've got what some say amounts to a legislative coup d'etat going on this woman's behalf despite numerous rulings by the Florida judge (a Republican appointee and a Southern Baptist, Judge Greer) who is handling the case. A judge who's heard the evidence, reviewed the applicable laws, and --

Oh, wait a minute. Activist judges. They're bad, right? We need a precedent with which we can beat them over the head, or at least make them irrelevant, don't we? More civilized, at least, than killing them.

And speaking of killing people, isn't it kind of wacky that Randall Terry, currently of the Society for Truth and Justice, is the media spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents? I mean, as founder of Operation Rescue, he's associated in one way or another with assassinations of health care providers who perform abortions, reproductive health clinic protests and violence. Plus, isn't he like the total poster child for abuse of bankruptcy laws?* What's up with that?

And then there's this post from Art Caplan on blog.bioethics.net, about Jon Eisenberg's article "The Terri Schiavo Case: Following the Money." While doing some work on the Schiavo case for free, Eisenberg wondered whether his colleagues working on behalf of Terri's parents were also donating their time. He found that they were not, and that their (extensive) funding came from an assortment of right-wing groups, many of whom also fund efforts to, for example, discredit evolutionary biology [oh, and fight to preserve the sanctity of marriage, and lobby against measures to prevent global warming, and all kinds of wacky shit that I'll get to in another post]. See archy's comments here for more on the Eisenberg article.

It makes my head hurt.

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*"The New York Times reported on November 8, 1998, that Terry "filed for bankruptcy last week in an effort to avoid paying massive debts owed to women's groups and abortion clinics that have sued him." As the Los Angeles Times reported on February 28, Terry's use of bankruptcy law to avoid paying for the judgments against him helped prompt Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) to propose an amendment to the bankruptcy bill recently passed by Congress that "specifically would prevent abortion opponents from using the bankruptcy code to escape paying court fines," although it was not included in the final version of the bill. --from Media Matters "Who is Randall Terry"

Update: The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting post: Schiavo and Conservative Judge Bashing. And Timothy Sandefur has interesting posts on Crime & Federalism and his own blog Freespace. (links via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)