Pro-life vs. support the troops

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 10:18 AM on August 25, 2005.

Two Republican shibboleths collided in Wisconsin.

A couple weeks back Pro-Life Wisconsin sent out a press release calling the doctors of a Marine, critically injured in Iraq, murderers.

The statement, since withdrawn, included this: "Simon was rendered handicapped by the bomb in Iraq ... he was murdered by those who were in charge of his medical care."

The cause? Marine Staff Sgt. Chad Jerome Simon's wife, as outlined in her husband's living will, had his feeding tube removed.

The hospice itself, clearly not run by Democrats in congress, did not pussyfoot around the issue. They responded by threatening legal action:

"The hospice care lawyers said if a retraction wasn't made by Friday, they would pursue other remedies. Pro-Life Wisconsin took the release off its Web site and released a revised press release Friday afternoon, deleting the reference to murder, saying instead, 'Sgt. Simon ... died as a result of having food and water intentionally withheld.'" Adding that the revision is still a: "tasteless and an unfounded attack on the grieving widow of a war hero," though not "defamatory."

Christian blogger Faithful Progressive is reminded of a noted Christian philosopher: "I thought of Immanuel Kant's famous statement that one of the keys to moral behavior involved always seeing another individual human being as an end unto itself and never as merely a means to an end."

And isn't this the height of hypocrisy? Of hubris? This group, under the guise of being "for life" is actually denying the humanness of others. Denying them free will, self determination -- a personal relationship with God in other words.

Fortunately, the Christian Alliance for Progress has issued a statement of its own, taking back Jesus:

"That such people as Chad’s caregivers, who live in the midst of constant suffering and with the ever present prospect of imminent death, all the while ministering to patient and family alike, should be insulted like this by a group claiming to be Christians is unfathomable. We condemn such abusive language used against Chad’s caregivers in the strongest possible terms as being the very antithesis of the Gospel of Jesus Christ."

As awful as the personal situation is, there's a larger point to be made. There's been no distancing or peep from the pro-life movement in Wisconsin or otherwise. This is exactly the kind of statement that must be used to divide the right.

This press release should be paraded around to every "pro-life" politician in the state and the nation to find out just where they stand -- to either expose them for the radicals they are or force them to renounce the radicals in their midst. Either way, this is the soft underbelly of the fragile alliance between right wing quasi-religious fanatics and their political godfathers and it should be explored. (Faithful Progressive)

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.