Life and death politics
The Schiavo case is just the latest front in a much nastier war
It is an American tragedy for the modern media age--litigious, polarizing, personal, political, and televised round-the-clock. After remaining frozen for 15 years, the saga of Terri Schiavo saw a lightning-quick succession of twists and turns last week before arriving at what is likely a short and sad final chapter. Just past midnight last Monday--three days after a feeding tube had been removed on orders from a Florida judge--Congress passed legislation crafted just for Schiavo, and President Bush climbed out of bed in his pajamas to sign it. The law allowed federal courts to lift Schiavo's case out of Florida, where more than a dozen judges have ruled in favor of Schiavo's husband, Michael, who says she is in a persistent vegetative state and would want to die, and against her parents, who reject that diagnosis and say she would want to live. But by midweek, her parents' campaign to reinsert Schiavo's feeding tube was unraveling. The Florida Senate defeated a bill to outlaw withholding food or water from patients without written instructions. The case bounced from state to federal courts and back again, while the Supreme Court, for at least the fifth time, declined to weigh in. State courts blocked Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's attempt to claim custody of Schiavo, and he declined calls from Christian groups to intervene anyway.
"Sanctity of life." While most Americans were only marginally aware of the Schiavo story until recently, religious conservatives have embraced the case as part of a broader movement to protect what they call the "sanctity of life." For many evangelicals and Roman Catholics, the religious right's two big constituencies, Schiavo is "a powerful symbol for what's wrong with this country," says University of Akron political science Prof. John Green, "which is that it doesn't respect life." Many social conservatives consider the fight to keep Schiavo alive an extension of the antiabortion stance, around which the modern Christian right formed in the 1970s. "The effort to reinstate Terri's feeding tube and the pro-life position stem from the same ethic," says Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. ". . . All human life is of value, regardless of the human's stage of development, level of health, or ability."
For social conservatives, the embrace of Schiavo fits a broader strategy of incremental changes: initiatives like the push for the recent passage of legislation banning the procedure opponents call "partial-birth" abortion. "We've wanted to dramatize the morality of end-of-life issues for some time," says Richard Cizik, chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, whose organization claims 30 million members. Schiavo provided a human face for promoting a "sanctity of life" over a "quality of life" approach to death and dying, says Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
While evangelicals received much attention in the aftermath of last November's election--when they accounted for 1 in 3 votes for Bush--the campaign to keep Schiavo alive has also highlighted the role of conservative Catholics in the Christian right. Bush won the Catholic vote last year after losing it in 2000, and his "culture of life" formulation, widely embraced by evangelicals, stems from a 1995 papal encyclical. Though evangelicals generally support the death penalty, which the Vatican opposes, "we find common cause where we can," says Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of pro-life activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "I'm sure," he adds, "that what the pope has said about capital punishment is also taken very seriously by evangelicals."
In addition to striking a chord with abortion opponents, the Schiavo case provided conservatives with another example of what they consider the tyranny of the nation's courts, which repeatedly declined to rule in favor of Schiavo's parents. "Schiavo is becoming the symbol for evangelicals and traditional Catholics that this legal system is . . . so broken it can't fix itself," says Land. "The remedy is to implant more backbone in Congress."
Conservative disillusionment with the judiciary helps explain the recent success of Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America by former Reagan administration official Mark Levin, which has shot up the New York Times bestseller list despite being largely ignored by the mainstream media. The book blasts the high court for supporting "terrorists' rights" and flag burning. "We are becoming a government run by the judiciary," says Levin. In the Schiavo case, he adds, the court "felt comfortable . . . rolling over the clear intent of Congress."
Social conservatives see the Schiavo case as a possible turning point. While Congress stressed that its intervention in the matter was not precedent setting, leaders on the right considered it a long-overdue first step by Congress to rein in a judiciary they say has been "legislating from the bench" on abortion rights and same-sex marriage. In its last session, the House passed legislation prohibiting federal courts from accepting challenges to the "under God" wording in the Pledge of Allegiance or to the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to disregard same-sex marriage licenses granted in other states. The bills died in the Senate, but publicity surrounding the Schiavo case may revive them and will certainly intensify calls for the nomination of a hard-right conservative to fill an expected Supreme Court vacancy and for Senate Republicans to invoke the "nuclear option" to overcome Democratic filibusters of Bush's judicial nominees.
"Values" lobbyists. While some disgruntled court-bashers welcomed last week's federal intervention, developments in Washington came so quickly in the days leading up to it, says Green, that "Congress's action may have surprised social conservatives as much as the rest of the country." Unlike previous campaigns by the religious right, says Christian activist Gary Bauer, "this was not a case where the House switchboard was shut down by the grass roots." Instead, when the House and Senate came to loggerheads over reconciling their two versions of the bill, a small band of "values" lobbyists focused on convincing House Majority Leader Tom DeLay that "the base would hold House Republicans accountable if they missed this chance to act," says the Center for a Just Society's Colin Stewart, who was involved in the effort. Ken Connor, the lawyer who represented Jeb Bush in his fight to keep Schiavo alive, says he enlisted national activists in a last-ditch lobbying effort with a simple formula: "Prayer plus principle plus pressure equals progress."
While leaders of the Christian right pushed hard for intervention in the Schiavo case, in-the-pews Christians appeared less convinced. An ABC News poll last week found that just 44 percent of evangelicals supported the bill that kicked the Schiavo case into federal court, while 38 percent of Catholics did. Some conservatives attacked the poll questions as biased, but "at this point," says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, "the [Christian right] grass roots doesn't seem to view this as clear-cut a case as the pro-life position."
Stay out. Opposition to Washington's intervention in the Schiavo case, polls showed, was deep. A CBS News poll found that 82 percent thought that Congress and the president should stay out of the matter. The ABC poll, meanwhile, found that three quarters said Congress acted to advance a political agenda, while just 13 percent said that the lawmakers cared about Schiavo. Public opinion could still shift, however. "Americans may see her as a victim of political football" and blame the president or congressional Republicans, says Green. "But after judges refuse to listen to her case, Schiavo could die a gruesome death, and people could come around to the [other] side. It's unpredictable."
But potentially momentous. The future of the culture wars may ride on whether the religious right's success in the Schiavo case is a harbinger of future gains or a spark that ignites a backlash from the rest of the country. Some Republicans are already nervous about perceptions that they may have overreached. "The White House has been very smart about crafting a social and moral agenda that wouldn't put off swing voters, through partial-birth abortion and faith-based initiatives," says GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio. "Now the question [for swing voters] becomes, What are these guys really about?"
Having announced that he was inclined to "err on the side of life" early last week, Bush said later that he had gone as far as he could in trying to help Schiavo. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, some Republicans said they voted to pass the Schiavo legislation on principle, rather than because of public opinion, but frustration was mounting. "I don't know how fighting to keep a woman alive is not compassionate, " grouses a House GOP aide. "I don't think Republicans are getting [credit]."
Democrats, meanwhile, are keeping a low profile, partly because they're divided on the issue. They helped pass the federal intervention bill in the Senate, but in the House, only half the Democrats showed up, and they split just about down the middle. "Everyone in American politics misread the American people on this one," says Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, who led the House Democrats' opposition to the bill. Democrats who feared they might end up on the wrong side of the "values" divide may turn out to be right, though at the moment the most recent polls suggest no such clarity, and an enduring impact of the Schiavo case remains to be seen. "This is the kind of case that sucks up all the oxygen out of the room until it's over," says Republican pollster Whit Ayres, "and then it's gone."
With Kenneth T. Walsh and Angie C. Marek
This story appears in the April 4, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.