FoxNews reports that the Schindlers are filing a final appeal to the Supreme Court.
Developing . . .
Pinellas Circuit Judge George Greer (search) rejected their argument that Schiavo tried to say “I want to live” hours before her tube was removed March 18. They argued that she said “AHHHHH” and “WAAAAAAA” when asked to repeat the phrase.
Also, details of Greer’s rejection of Friday night’s plea are emerging:
[A]ll of the credible medical evidence this court has received over the last five years is that this is not a cognitive response but rather something akin to a person jerking his/her hand off a hot stove long before he/she has thought about it," Greer wrote.
I have written plenty about experts missing reality. Greer, clearly, places more credence in the testimony of one expert than in the consistent testimony of a dozen care givers. That’s too bad. Rule by experts is a terrible way to live. I’m thinking now of G. K. Chesterton’s defense of common man.
The thesis is this: that modern emancipation has really been a new persecution of the Common Man. If it has emancipated anybody, it has in rather special and narrow ways emancipated the Uncommon Man. It has given an eccentric sort of liberty to some of the hobbies of the wealthy, and occasionally to some of the more humane lunacies of the cultured. The only thing that it has forbidden is common sense, as it would have been understood by the common people. Thus, if we begin with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find that a man really has become more free to found a sect. But the Common Man does not in the least want to found a sect. He is much more likely, for instance, to want to found a family. And it is exactly there that the modern emancipators are quite likely to begin to frustrate him; in the name of Malthusianism or Eugenics or Sterilisation or at a more advanced stage of progress, probably, Infanticide. It would be a model of modern liberty to tell him that he might preach anything, however wild, about the Virgin Birth, so long as he avoided anything like a natural birth; and that he was welcome to build a tin chapel to preach a twopenny creed, entirely based on the text, “Enoch begat Methuselah”, so long as he himself is forbidden to beget anybody. And, as a matter of historical fact, the sects which enjoyed this sectarian freedom, in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, were generally founded by merchants or manufacturers of the comfortable, and sometimes of the luxurious classes. On the other hand, it is strictly to the lower classes, to use the liberal modern title for the poor, that such schemes as Sterilisation are commonly directed and applied.
. . .
Progress has a hagiology, a martyrology, a mass of miraculous legends of its own, like any other religion; and they are mostly false and belong to a false religion. The most famous is the fancy that the young and progressive person is always martyred by the old and ordinary person. But it is false. It is the old and ordinary person who is almost always the martyr. It is the old and ordinary person who has been more and more despoiled of all his old and ordinary rights. In so far as this progress progresses, it is far more likely that six million men will be forbidden to go to sleep, because six men say that certain breathing exercises are a substitute for slumber, than that any of the six million somnambulists will wake up sufficiently to clout the six men over their highbrowed but half-witted heads. There is no normal thing that cannot now be taken from the normal man. It is much more likely that a law will be passed to forbid the eating of grain (notoriously the parent of poisons like beer and whisky) than that it will be even faintly suggested, to men of that philosophy, that the economic evil is that men cannot grow grain, and that the ethical evil is that men are still despised for growing it. Given the purely progressive principle, and nothing else as a guide to our future, it is entirely possible that they may be banged or buried alive for growing it. But of course, in a scientific age, they will be electrocuted–or perhaps only tortured by electricity.
And so it goes 100 years after Chesterton wrote those word. The common man is martyred by the Uncommon Man–judges and doctors. Perhaps it’s time to take Michelle Malkin’s advice and just pray.