If my writing and consideration favors foreign policy it is because matters abroad are set in the barest terms, literal terms, of liberty and slavery. One comfort of residence in freedom is that every liberal moral argument, no matter how bitter, takes place in civility; that comfort, since September 11, 2001, has also become a cautionary. As I am not too interested in, say, the finer concrete points and nuance of Iraqi, Afghan and Lebanese polity so I find the various American domestic stalemates to be a lesser use of my resources than that which did, and could again, subordinate all things vernacular.
Having said that, I nod to National Review for their stand in the case of Terri Schiavo, supportive of Congress exercising its prerogative to, right or wrong, review federal supremacy by Article VI of the Constitution against a state's claim to the Tenth Amendment. National Review fellow John Derbyshire plays black sheep on this one, neutral to the question. He's been fielding letters from readers and I paid it little mind — save for one correspondent's antagonism, a smarmy remark about "good, conservative Christians":
But is it necessary for everyone to go through these experiences before they can grow out of the denial that seems to be the standard attitude about death in our society? Or can we bring about a healthier realization of its naturalness and inevitability at the same time we work to extend length and quality of life? (And by the way, aren't good conservative Christians taught, especially this week, to see death as a beginning, not an end?)
Good Christians. This is exactly the kind of shallow caricature of Christianity that underwrites all sorts of horrors. Derbyshire's correspondent might wish to actually read the Bible to learn that Christ was not unafraid of His impending pain and death; nor was His execution, however a part of a Divine plan, just; nor is death itself, regardless of any noble accomplishments made therein, at all celebrated by God. If we're to talk Christianity, death is a consequence of temptation in the Garden. Christ's sacrifice appealed to grace for the damned upon death, damned by sin in life, which is certainly not some sort of trivial interlude before the correspondent's ghoulish idea of surcease. Pain, I'm sorry to say, has chilled the correspondent's blood to ice.
The "enlightened" should remember that when incapacitation is judged life inferior, the infirmed, elderly, infant and retarded are condemned. Whatever our duty to the helpless, it's not to write them off. On that, James Lileks, no scold, reminds us through fiction how deafening subtle implication can be.
'UNTOUCHABLES': More from Robert P. George.