"No Lie Is Too Low For Them": What the Terri Schiavo Affair Can Teach Us About Today's Right-Wing Zealots

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March 31st marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Terri Schiavo. For that one month in 2005, the nation was transfixed, as the cable television news networks gathered en masse for a round-the-clock campout outside Terri's hospice, the public was sucked in by the portrayal of a defenseless victim about to have her feeding tubes pulled. The real story of a family's struggle with end of life decisions: Terri's husband Michael's efforts to facilitate her recovery since her collapse fifteen years earlier into a permanent vegetative state, the bitter estrangement of her husband and parents through this exhausting process, and the ultimate, wretching decision about what to do became the fodder of a fully-owned conservative enterprise who framed the events as "the struggle to keep Terri alive."

The media acted "like sharks attacking the wounded," Jon Eisenberg, an Oakland, California appellate lawyer who was one of Michael Schiavo's attorney's in the Terri Schiavo case, recently told AlterNet in an e-mail exchange. And the Religious Right acted out of "pure opportunism." It appeared, Eisenberg added, that they were concerned with much broader issues like attacking the fundamental constitutional right of control over your own body, known as "personal autonomy": "They cared not one whit about Terri Schiavo.

At the height of the Terri Schiavo affair, Rob Boston, a senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, attended a conference on "judicial activism" organized by Rick Scarborough, a Texas-based conservative and Christian evangelical leader. "I've covered the Religious Right for a long time, and even I was taken aback by the rhetoric," Boston recalled, via e-mail exchange with AlterNet. "I remember the crude attacks on Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr., a conservative jurist who incurred the wrath of the right-wing by rebuking Congress for its intervention in the case. In another speech, David C. Gibbs III, the attorney for Schiavo's parents, accused Michael Schiavo of murder."

Boston pointed out that statements by Gibbs and others that Terri Schiavo was not in a vegetative state were a stark example of how these groups simply made up their own reality, and how "no lie is too low for them if it serves their larger political agenda."

"During the Schiavo controversy, the Religious Right's operational theory was 'the ends justify the means' and 'any lie is acceptable if it helps us get what we want,'" Boston said. "They bent the truth like taffy and then had the unmitigated gall to pretend to be operating from a superior ethical stance. And when an autopsy later showed that Terri Schiavo's brain had shrunken to half the normal size and there never was hope for recovery, they simply lied about that as well.""

Substitute the Tea Party movement for the Religious Right and, for anyone that has followed the past year's debate over health care reform it might be déjà vu.

The Terri Schiavo case was a prime example of how the Republican Party -- aided and abetted by the Religious Right and a formidable array of right-wing foundations, think tanks, public relations firms and conservative legal entities -- used a deeply personal issue, and turned it into an attack on fundamental rights, and, failing that, an attack on the failure of government officials, aka "judicial activists," to stand up for life.

The GOP pulled out all the stops and created a public spectacle. Although the effort ultimately failed, and the Religious Right's reputation was at least temporarily sullied, earlier this year GOP leaders, (substitute Boehner for DeLay and McConnell for Frist), and its surrogates, this time in the form of Tea Partiers, resuscitated some of the same tactics, fear laced with maximum anger, in an attempt to kill health care reform.