tdaxp

"A Tragic Death and other Tragic Deaths," by Juan Cole, Informed Consent, 1 April 2005, http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/tragic-death-and-other-tragic-deaths-i.html.

I blogged Cole's view of nation-building earlier today from the same post. But Cole is an original thinker and a great writer. I've pulled out that post's comments on the Schiavo case.

The Radical Center is that state of the far-Left or the far-Right where Left/Right differences fade away. Positions are so divorced from the political census that it is impossible to locate them on a conventional political access. Radical Centrist ideas are not necessarily wrong, but they are unusual.

Without comment, Dr. Cole's Radical Centrist view on the Schiavo case:

What is interesting about the analogy, however, is that it seems to turn on its head the central underlying values of the anti-abortion lobby.

Anti-abortion activism is essentially patriarchal. It insists that the woman's egg, once fertilized, is immediately a person and that the woman loses control over her body by virtue of being impregnated by her husband's sperm. It is men who dictate to the woman that she must carry the fertilized egg to term, must be a mother once impregnated by a man. For extreme anti-abortionists, even a woman who has been raped or is in danger of losing her life if she tries to give birth must be forced to bear the child. A rapist can make a woman be a mother whether she likes it or not, because his maleness gives him prerogatives not withdrawn by his mere criminality.

...

The Schiavo case, in contrast, appears on the surface to be anti-patriarchal. The activists in this case attempted to deprive Ms. Schiavo's husband of his status as her legal guardian and of his ability to decide, with the physicians, not to make heroic efforts to keep her alive in a vegetative state. The activists sided with his mother-in-law, thus appearing to support matriarchy over patriarchy. Why Tom DeLay thought that would be a way of beating up on the Democratic Party is a great mystery. But an even greater mystery is why his conscience would let him play politics with an issue that had touched him personally, when he let his own brain-damaged father die.

...

It turns out that anti-abortionism is not about life at all. It is about social control. It helps establish a hierarchical society in which men are at the pinnacle and women kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Likewise, the Schiavo case was in part about the religious Right dictating to Michael Schiavo how he must lead his private life.

...

And that is also how the Schiavo case makes sense in the end, because the religious Right feminized Michael Schiavo, made him into the pregnant woman seeking an "abortion," and wished to therefore deprive him of choice in the matter. If hierarchy is gendered, then the persons over which control is sought are always in some sense imagined as powerless women.

...

It is about hierarchy, power and control. It is not about life.