pantoum's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SEEK TRUTH FOR AUTHORITY

Well the poor woman's body has finally been allowed to die.

I've been looking out the window at ominous clouds, wondering how many of Terri Schiavo's angry mourners mourned Matthew Shephard's death, how many support the Fred Phelps, who protested at Matthew's funeral and tortured his grieving parents during the worst hours of their lives.

There were no good outcomes in this tragedy, but these religious and political parasites who latched on to one family's tragedy for their own gain really disgust me.

How can DeLay, whose moral lapses are legion—a man who removed life support from his own parent—look at himself in the mirror? How can Frist, who advises the families of his own patients who had suffered irreversible heart damage to let their loved one die with dignity? Surely a reporter can expose him for the opportunistic fraud that he is.

Yahoo! reports that "Dawn Kozsey, 47, a musician who was among those outside Schiavo's hospice [but who, evidently, didn't even know her], wept. 'Words cannot express the rage I feel,' she said. 'Is my heart broken for this? Yes.' "

Did Dawn Kozsey mourn Matthew Shepherd's murder? Express rage against a homohating culture that judges him worthy of death? Was her heart broken?

Yahoo! again

Rev. Frank Pavone said:

This is not only a death, with all the sadness that brings, but this is a killing, and for that we not only grieve [the deceased's passing] but we grieve that our nation has allowed such an atrocity as this and we pray that it will never happen again.

I was on a bus in New York City just after news about Matthew Shepherd broke and heard the woman behind me say "Those fags deserve to die. Fucking in the butt like they got no sense."

The irony of the pope being on a tube is not lost on me. Nor is the irony of a man being arrested for offering a reward for the murder of Michael Shiavo (because this money-offerer supports life, no doubt).

I have made the awful decision to remove or not remove life support on a loved one four times now. This is a horrible decision to make, but the right answer seemed clear each time.

My grandmother, who climbed mountains in her eighties and who enjoyed excellent health for most of her life, had a massive heart attack. Tests showed that she suffered major damage and had no chance for a meaningful recovery. A surgeon explained that he could break open her ribs, perform surgery, and keep her body alive (and in ICU) for a few more weeks, but she had no chance of meaningful recovery.

Who would make that decision?

My father—and this is useful information for everyone to know—signed a DNR in the hospital, was subsequently released, and was then readmitted a few hours later. The admissions clerk told him that he did not have to sign a new DNR, but, when he went into heart failure, the doctors insisted on reviving him because he had failed to sign one. This means that, instead of dying naturally from the cancer that had metastasized all over his body (cancer that no one knew about until the previous evening, after he'd been admitted for routines tests), he lived with no brain activity for five more days because my little sister—who was separated from her husband and days away from delivering her first child—refused to believe the doctor when he said that Daddy was a vegetable.

She argued with him, told us that we wanted to murder our father, insisted Daddy was recovering.

It was awful, but my mother was right to say that the decision to remove life support should be unanimous.

Subsequently, he lay in ICU for days basically melting as cancer attacked the part of his brain that regulates temperature. Then my sister finally agreed that we should remove life support

Thankfully, the Ginger's father is a surgeon who understood that Mom had no chance of a meaningful recovery, and what a gift that the Ginger and her dad and I were in the room with Mom when she died.

We made the decision to not remove life support from my then-seventeen-year-old brother Dopeboy after his horrible motorcycle wreck—and this despite heavy pressure from doctors and nurses to donate his young organs to help someone who had some chance of meaningful recovery.

(They told us he had no chance of survival, but he was screaming when the equipment indicated that he was dead and was trying to bite the nurses when the doctor performed a cutdown on him with no anesthesia and we decided that he deserved the right to fight for his life ... and he lived.

•

David Morris posted an article about the dangers of politicizing religion on Alternet today. In it, he explores how

organized religion elevates superstition to an entirely new level. . . . Let's call its institutions by their proper name [he says]: "superstition-based institutions" [and then asks readers to] consider the impact on the audience if we switched the interchangeable terms in President George W. Bush's . . . statement, posted on a federal website:

I believe in the power of superstition in people's lives. Our government should not fear programs that exist because a church or a synagogue or a mosque has decided to start one. We should not discriminate against programs based upon superstition in America. We should enable them to access federal money, because superstition-based programs can change people's lives, and America will be better off for it.

Morris quotes Robert Green Ingersoll, who travels the country pronouncing "why the word God does not appear in the U.S. Constitution."

The founding fathers knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man.

Ingersoll believes that reason, not faith, could and should be the basis for modern morality. "Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of inspiration [but rather] the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge—that is to say, of science. When man [sic] becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights . . .when worship . . . consist[s] in doing useful things [including] the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men [sic], then, and not until then, will the world be civilized."

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman. . . . I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindu woman burn herself upon a funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion. Man [sic], of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, "Thus saith the Lord," of course he can do it.

Finally, he notes with alarm that

organized superstition in this country has begun to drive and guide social policy. The clearest example of this is the recent enactment by several states of laws that allow pharmacists and doctors and hospitals to refuse to treat patients whose behavior conflicts with the their superstitions.

The central problem with organized, assertive religion, of course, is that it endows superstition with a moral and messianic fervor. God-directed superstition can be a lethal force. Indeed, one might argue that this type of force is behind much of the violence around the world.

3:22 p.m. - 2005-03-31

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next