Jesse Jackson joins fight for Terri Schiavo's life

Highlighting the bi-partisan nature of the fight to save Terri Schiavo from the longest public execution in American history, Jesse Jackson has entered the fray. And he is having an immediate impact, as this Boston Globe piece indicates:

With Terri Schiavo's life ebbing away, a liberal stalwart, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, yesterday barnstormed into the controversy over her right to die, arriving by limousine to launch an eleventh-hour lobbying effort to persuade the Florida legislature to order the 41-year-old's feeding tube reinserted. The Florida Senate last week narrowly defeated Schiavo-related legislation after wrenching debate. But a shift in the votes of just two legislators would make the bill law. Early this morning, Schiavo's parents received some rare good news. A federal appeals court in Atlanta agreed to consider a petition for a new hearing on whether to reconnect their daughter's feeding tube.

I'm more than a bit cynical about Jesse Jackson, but it's hard not to be touched by this story:

Jackson is the first prominent liberal to join the Schindler family's long-running effort to prolong their severely brain-damaged daughter's life, and his arrival yesterday created some unexpected drama. Antiabortion conservative Randall Terry emerged from a session with Jackson in tears, saying the former Democratic presidential candidate discussed Jesus Christ's resurrection with Terri Schiavo's parents before hitting the phones.

''I just had one of the more profound moments in my life in that room," said Terry, who has become a spokesman for the Schindler family and has long been known for confrontational tactics at abortion clinic protests. ''May God bless Jesse Jackson."

Meanwhile, a Jesuit bioethicist, John J. Paris, who teaches at Boston College, informs Newsweek that Terri has a "right to die" and that the people fighting for her life are a bunch of simple-minded morons. Likewise, Father Richard McBrien helps the L.A. Times understand what the fuss is all about; like Paris, he takes it for granted that Terri Schiavo is in a "vegetative state"—an assumption that is, to put it mildly, very hotly contested. Despite the seriousness of the topic, one has to chuckle to read McBrien somberly talk of "theologically erroneous" and "irresponsible" positions. McBrien is fairly adept at proposing "theologically erroneous" and "irresponsible" positions, as the National Council of Catholic Bishops's Committee on Doctrine pointed out in detail back in 1996 in criticizing his tome, Catholicism.

Speaking of the L.A. Times, the folks over at "Oh, That Liberal Media," have shown how the Left Coast Times has tried to make Michael Schiavo into a martyr and has seriously misrepresented what it is like to be starved and dehydrated to death.

Comments

[Ed Peters]

I remember when Jesse Jackson was pro-life, too. Who knows, maybe...