The Necrophiliac Vote

It's been a year since Terri Schiavo died, and what have we learned?

That there is no tragedy, however big or damaging to the family or loved ones of the victims, that the Christian Right Death Cult will not exploit and twist for their own aggrandizement. This woman was beyond help perhaps the day after her heart attack fifteen years before she finally died, and I really can't blame her parents for wanting to hope and believe that she might snap out of it.

But that was not to be. After a while, you have to reconcile yourself to the fact that the person isn't coming back, and it's time to let her go.

Enter the Death Cult. They embraced the 'cause' with all of the fervor they could muster, attracting mindless adherents and complete whackaloons from as far away as Alaska to come to Florida and scream and posture and fondle themselves. Even the President went so far as to take a break from his vacation to come to Washington and sign a law that would have marked the greatest intrusion of the Federal Government into a single family's life in our nation's checkered history.

Thankfully the courts killed it.

I recall those few months with no joy, although I was eager to see whether Governor Jeb Bush would violate a judge's order and get his pudgy ass locked up (to their credit, none of the Florida law enforcement officers dared try to intervene). In a chat room, one person asked me why a doctor just didn't put Ms. Schiavo down, like a dog.

I had to explain that Florida had no assisted-suicide law, and doctors who aid suicides go to prison.

So what have we learned from throwing a spotlight on this family's suffering, demonizing a grieving husband, and generally dragging a lifeless corpse through the streets?

1. That everyone needs a living will.

2. That the Christian Right Death Cult needs to be driven back into the furthest recesses of the national id, where it belongs, and to have those recesses barricaded to prevent it from ever emerging again.