The torture of Terri Schiavo

More from Andrew McCarthy. He compares the treatment of terrorists to the court-ordered starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo, set to begin tomorrow:

On Friday afternoon, unless humanity intervenes, the state of Florida is scheduled to begin its court-ordered torture-murder of Terri Schiavo, whose only crime is that she is an inconvenience. A nuisance to a faithless husband grown tired of the toll on his new love interest and depleting bank account — an account that was inflated only because a jury, in 1992, awarded him over a million dollars, mostly as a trust to pay for Terri’s continued care, in a medical malpractice verdict.

In this instance, though, deafening is the only word for the silence of my former interlocutors — -civil-liberties activists characteristically set on hysteria auto-pilot the moment an al Qaeda terrorist is rumored to have been sent to bed without supper by Don Rumsfeld or Al Gonzales (something that would, of course, be rank rumor since, if you kill or try to kill enough Americans, you can be certain our government will get you three halal squares a day).

Not so Terri Schiavo. She will be starved and dehydrated. Until she is dead. By court order.

My deepest sense of this situation is that Terri will be saved. I hope that is true. If that woman is not actually there, as the medical types assert, then she's done a marvelous job of fooling her parents, and me. She gives the appearance of someone struggling silently to live within her damaged body, and for the medical types and the courts to wave their hands and assert otherwise is just very strange stuff indeed.

May God bless Terri Schiavo.