Friday, March 25, 2005

Reynolds, Sullivan and Schiavo

Glenn Reynolds lays the smack down! I'm just going to bring the whole thing over because, quite frankly when Glenn writes more than one paragraph on Instapundit, it's got to be good!
I APPRECIATE Andrew Sullivan's quoting me, but he's wrong: Unlike Andrew, I don't think that America is in danger of being taken over by religious Zealots, constituting an American Taliban and bent on establishing theocracy. I think that -- despite their occasionally abusive emails (and most aren't abusive, just upset) -- the people that Mickey Kaus is calling "pro-tubists" are well-meaning, sincere, and possessed of an earnest desire to do good. I don't think that they're nascent Mullah Omars, and I think that calling them that just makes the problem worse. This is a tragedy, and it's become a circus. Name-calling just makes you one of the clowns.

But I do think that process, and the Constitution, matter. Trampling the Constitution in an earnest desire to do good in high-profile cases has been a hallmark of a certain sort of liberalism, and it's the sort of thing that I thought conservatives eschewed. If I were in charge of making the decision, I might well put the tube back and turn Terri Schiavo over to her family. But I'm not, and the Florida courts are, and they seem to have done a conscientious job. Maybe they came to the right decision, and maybe they didn't. But respecting their role in the system, and not rushing to overturn all the rules because we don't like the outcome, seems to me to be part of being a member of civilized society rather than a mob. As I say, I thought conservatives knew this.
Yeah, that's pretty much how I view the legal matters involved. Which is a compliment to the Hewitt comment that perfectly describes my view on the morality of all this.