Michael Schiavo, George Felos, and Judge Greer--

By Their Own Standard--Could Be Executed !

If we were too use their own criterion, Michael Schiavo, George Felos, and Judge Greer could be taken hostage, tortured in the most cruel and painful ways possible for several weeks, and then executed.

And what criterion could I possibly be referring to? The criterion used by you “starve Terri to death” advocates, as well as by Hitler, Doctor Joseph Mengela, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Kim Jong-il, the radical Islamists, Saddam Hussein, and endless other totalitarian monsters who have practiced genocide, murdering hundreds of millions of innocent human beings.

That criterion is this: “If (a person)₁ does not possess (a certain quality of human life)_2, (set as a minimum standard by some powerful elite)₃, (then it is permissible to dispatch or kill that person by any excruciatingly painful and inhumane method chosen by that elite)₄.”

The conditional clause and the conclusion of this criterion both (1) sets you starvation advocates against our founding documents including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s fourteenth amendment, and (2) aligns you with virtually every totalitarian mass murderer in history including those named above.

The conditional clause, “If a person₁ does not possess a certain quality of human life_2, set as a minimum standard by some powerful elite₃” has two conditions, both of which contradict the founding principles of this nation. Those two conditions are “a person does not possess a certain quality of human life” and that quality of life is “set as a minimum standard by some powerful elite”).

In contrast, the founders recognized that any human life and all human lives are granted by their creator with certain rights including the right to life that exist prior to and with precedence over any law(s) or government(s). Therefore, the right to life and other fundamental rights are “unalienable”—they cannot be removed by any human society or government because they were not granted or “endowed” by any society or government.

The problem that the founders understood is that once you have granted that an elite can set the standards for legitimate life, all you have to do is change who the elite are, and any of us are vulnerable to losing our lives.

Once you have admitted any elite’s definition of legitimate human life, on what moral or intellectual basis could you question any other elite’s definitions of legitimate life? For instance, once you accept the fundamental premise of the criterion, it is equally moral (or immoral) to fill in the ordered variables with any of the following sets of specifics:

Variable1	Variable2	Variable3	Variable4
If (a person)	does not possess a certain quality of human life	set as a minimum standard by some powerful elite	then it is permissible to dispatch or kill that person by (any excruciatingly painful and inhumane method chosen by that elite)
if Terri Schiavo	cannot feed herself or clearly express her desires verbally	as dictated by Michael Schiavo, George Felos, and Judge Greer	then it is okay to slowly and exruciatingly kill Terri by dehydration and starvation
if the disabled	cannot fully function as a healthy productive part of the super-race	as dictated by Dr. Joseph Mengela	then it is okay to do horrific and excruciatingly painful medical experiments on the disabled
if Jews & their supporters	cannot exist as part of the Arian super-race	as dictated by Adolf Hitler	it is okay to put them in slave camps, starve them, and exterminate them
if non-Stalinists	will not become supporters of the Communist Party and of Joseph Stalin	as dictated by Joseph Stalin	it is okay to starve them to death through manipulated famines
if women, homosexuals, Christians, and Jews	will not submit to shariah	as dictated by Wahhabi mullahs	it is okay to rape them, maim them, torture them, and kill them.

This idea that some elite--any elite--can dictate the criterion for legitimate life places all of us at risk. Once you accept the criterion as a legitimate moral or intellectual position, there is nothing intellectually or morally to be complained about when a new elite changes the specifics in the criterion so that you, your group, your race, etc. is the group that does not posses sufficient quality of life to have a right to life.

Thus, we could change the elite to “moralists who believe it is murder to kill any innocent person”, and Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer, and George Felos could themselves be at risk:

If Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer, and George Felos

did not have enough morality and humanity to protect the life of innocent Terry Schiavo

as dictated by moralists who believe it is murder to kill any innocent person

then it is permissible to dispatch or kill Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer, and George Felos in the same fashion in which they killed Terri Schiavo.

Of course, the paradox is that the only power elite in control of the country in whose hands the lives of Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer, and George Felos would be safe (at least until they have been found guilty of a crime) are the community they have opposed and mocked as religious fanatics.

For it is that community that Michael Schiavo and George Felos criticize so harshly who in fact believe in the words of the Founders in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” and in the words of the fourteenth amendment, “. . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; no deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Most American’s belief in those principles is the only reason that Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer, and George Felos, or any of the rest of us are currently safe from the same treatment that Schiavo, Felos, and Greer dispensed to Terri Schiavo.

Don Crawford, Host of the Flipside Talk Show in Austin