From The Nation
Dated Thursday March 31
Backward Christian Soldiers
By Katha Pollitt
Maybe, just maybe, the religious right and its Republican friends have finally gone too far with the Terri Schiavo case. Americans may tell pollsters the earth was created in six days flat and dinosaurs shared the planet with Adam and Eve, but I don't believe they want Tom DeLay to be their personal physician. I don't think they want fanatics moaning and praying outside the hospital while they're making hard decisions. I don't think they want people getting arrested trying to "feed" their comatose relatives, or issuing death threats against judges and spouses in the name of "life." I don't think John Q. Public wants Jeb Bush to adopt his wife or Newt Gingrich to call her by her first name or Senator Frist to diagnose her by video, or Jesse Jackson to pop in at the last minute for a prayer and a photo-op . . . .
For many ordinary Americans, the stem cell debate was the first time the religious right strove to deprive them of something valuable. It's one thing to make women pay for sex with childbirth, or to deprive your children of modern scientific education, or to ostracize homosexuals, but it's going too far to value a frozen embryo more than Cousin Jim with Parkinson's. Now, with the Schiavo case, Americans have another opportunity to ask themselves if they really want to live in Randall Terry's world, where the next Michael and Terri Schiavo could be anyone of us.
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