Oops, sorry about the crap at the top of the post folks. Maybe a clone could take it out, and just leave the text excerpts?

McGrath, there is a lot of shrillness in any political debate surrounding right to privacy issues like this. This isn't the first time the US has suffered it's way through really painful debates on whether or not the state has the right to make medical treatment decisions on behalf of individuals who aren't able to make or communicate their medical decisions to their care providers.

This is a hot button issue for many of us who are going through, or already have gone through, the death of a family member that could possibly have been impacted by these federal shenanigans.

The Right to Life movement, and their Republican politicians they helped elect, want to see their very narrow, ignorant, Christian fundamentalist religious beliefs regarding "the sanctity of all life" (weeeelll....except maybe the lives of the people we don't like, like death row inmates, the Iraqi and Afghan peoples, old ladies, etc etc), and wish to impose it upon all American citizens. They are attempting to use this case to overturn the last 20 years of legislation at the state level regarding end of life care, and deny the right for the dying (and their legal guardians) to choose to refuse and/or withdraw medical treatment.

While the current bill being voted on in Congress this weekend somewhat limits the intervention to this single case, it also makes reference to others like it. The Senate refused to consider the House bill passed last week, that would have opened up the bill to any and all patients who are not able to make medical decisions for themselves.

Whether people want to accept the fact or not that the Right to Life movement has catapulted this major legislation onto the federal front in the last few days, which will end up depriving all US citizens of the right for their legal guardians to make health care decisions on their behalf without state and federal intervention, it is happening nonetheless. It is being pushed through as a religious bill on behalf of the fascist Republican Christian fundamentalist constituency too--Tom DeLay absolutely gloated over the fact that the vote in the House would take place on Palm Sunday, and preached hate towards the husband from the press conference podium yesterday, invoking all sorts of Christian fundamentalist symbolism.

In the wake of these bills having been proposed in numerous state legislatures around the country, after passage of this bill being proposed today, after the "Terri's Law" bill that Jeb Bush forced through the Florida legislature in 2003 (which was declared unconstitutional), and this extraordinary intervention by the federal legislative branch to overturn both state and federal judicial rulings in this case, I'd say people were idiots if they didn't think their right to medical privacy wasn't being invaded BIG TIME, and the right to make medical decisions on behalf of an incapacitated loved one for whom they are the legal guardian taken away from them by the Republican politicians so blatantly and cynically pandering to their Christian fundamentalist voter base.