This issue gets to the essence of the culture war. Shall the state be allowed to interfere in the most delicate, complicated personal matters of life, death and health because a particular religious constituency holds that their belief system should override each individual's right to make these personal decisions for him or herself. And it isn't the allegedly statist/communist/socialist left that is agitating for the government to tell Americans how they must live and how they must die.

One of the things that we need to help America understand is that there is a big difference between the way the two parties perceive the role of government in its citizens personal lives. Democrats want the government to collect money from all its citizens in order to deliver services to the people. The Republicans want the government to collect money from working people in order to dictate individual citizen's personal decisions. You tell me which is the bigger intrusion into the average American's liberty?

More: I wrote this earlier today, in an e-mail to friends:

I thought that a "bill of attainder" [forbidden by the Constitution in Article 1, Section 9] was a legislative act which pronounced someone guilty or (more generally) took away a person's rights, without benefit of trial. In this case the husband's legal right under Florida state law to make life and death decisions for his incapacitated wife would be taken away from him by an act of Congress (signed by the President) without benefit of trial.

If I'm correct, I imagine that once they finish grandstanding and pass the bill, and it's signed, Schiavo will have to go to a Federal court and get an injunction against the law being enforced on the grounds that it is a bill of attainder. Somewhere along the line, some judge will grant the injunction, and the government will appeal it directly to the Supreme Court, which will (even *this* court) pronounce it unconstitutional and nullify it.

Meanwhile, the GOP will have gotten its publicity, the Democrats will have been wedged into an awkward position, "liberal judges" will have been demonized (again), Schiavo will be forced to spend more money unnecessarily, and the situation will end up exactly where it began.

More on the legal and political issues in this good round-up:

If this law is declared valid, no decision in any state court in the country will be immune from Congressional second-guessing. It would throw out of whack the entire concept of separation of powers. The constitutional law expert [Lawrence] Tribe calls it "trial by legislation" and he is right.

P.S. I apologize to Michael and Terri Schiavo for using their surname to denominate the current bout of Republican hypocrisy, but it seems inevitable to me that "Schiavo" is what we'll end up calling this episode. It's just another way in which the actions of the GOP have intruded into the privacy of these people.

(Previous post here.)

Update (3/22): More on the legal issues here, here, and here. [Links via Majikthise.]