The law is a ass ~~Charles Dickens

Jack Dunphy has some choice words on the subject today from
National Review Online (http://www.nationalreview.com):

If Terri Schiavo were able, she would go to the nearest telephone, dial 9-1-1, and tell the operator that people are trying to kill her. Police officers would respond, and they would take whatever action was necessary, up to and including laying down their own lives, to ensure that no harm came to this innocent, defenseless woman. If the perpetrators were identified, they would be arrested and prosecuted, perhaps to receive very lengthy sentences in prison. She cannot make that phone call, of course, but those who love her have made it for her, crying out to any and all who might have the authority to stand in the path of what now appears inevitable: the very public starvation and death of Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo.

How on earth can this be?

. . . In Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, for example, there appeared a story under the headline, "Ceasing Food and Fluid Can Be Painless." Incredibly, the point of the story seemed to be that death by starvation is an experience to be enjoyed, something we should all look forward to. It is staggering that things have come to such a pass.

The details of the case have been exhaustively reported here on NRO and elsewhere, but Ms. Schiavo's fate can be traced through a nearly impenetrable cloud of legal rulings, page upon page of citations and references and footnotes, all of it laced with words like movant and respondent and all the other esoteric terms that seem to flow so freely from the lips and pens of lawyers and judges. It is this specialized language that allows those employed in the law to imagine themselves superior to the rest of us, the unwashed of the lower orders, to whom such language is foreign. And it is this language that the various lawyers and judges will hide behind when Terri Schiavo dies, when all their writs and motions and petitions have flown from office to office and courthouse to courthouse before floating down and congealing into a massive pile of recyclable rubbish."