"No Lie Is Too Low For Them": What the Terri Schiavo Affair Can Teach Us About Today's R/W Zealots

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"No Lie Is Too Low For Them": What the Terri Schiavo Affair Can Teach Us About Today's Right-Wing Zealots
Five years after the death of Terri Schiavo, right-wing opportunists continue to use her case to advance their political agenda.
March 31, 2010 |

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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.

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