Are our lives ours to keep and take at our will, or are they gifts which are sacred and not ours to possess but to safeguard? These questions aptly summarize the two opposing views of not just the Terri Schiavo case, but also the larger debate over the definition of life and death, and the role a good government plays in protecting a citizen’s right to each. When does human life start and when does it end? If we had a concrete answer to this question, what happened last month in Florida would be a non-issue: we would clearly see that the underlying issue here is not the alleviation of suffering or the preservation of dignity, it is the preservation of human life, of which we are merely the custodians, lacking final ownership.

In the course of her illness, Terri was appointed no less than three guardian ad litems by the court. Not one of these men, who were asked to weigh all the evidence of the case to ascertain Terri’s exact wishes, sided with her husband or ruled that she would wish to be starved to death. It is also interesting to note that her husband, the principle proponent of her demise, fought exhaustively for her to stay alive until shortly after the sizable malpractice case he filed on her behalf was settled. Conveniently, he never considered telling anyone about Terri’s desire to not be kept alive until after this suit was settled. These facts of the case are irrelevant, however, when put into the perspective of the much larger and nefarious forces at work in deciding Terri’s fate.

A movement has emerged within our society that seeks nothing less than the cheapening of the value of human life. Using such language as the “right to die” and “death with dignity,” these people have allowed their own moral relativism to cloud their vision of the fundamental core of the issue: it is not our life to take. Language such as “death with dignity” makes an idol of our pride; we put our image of ourselves in frailty before the greater responsibility we have been tasked with – that of protecting the great gift we have been given. The Pope understood this key point, and with every breath he drew to his last treasured that gift.

As a society, we are bound to the idea that the highest purpose of a good government is the safeguarding of human life, regardless of its relative worth to society. Indeed, the very moral foundation of our society rests on the assertion that it is the role of the strong to protect and defend the weak. In this regard, we have failed horribly: we denied a defenseless woman the same due process that we demand of our most heinous mass murderers. We are not willing to sentence a man to death without an exhaustive examination of the evidence, a trial by his peers and an incredibly long appeals process – yet this is exactly what we have done to this woman, and she was guilty of no other crime aside other than being chronically disabled. Yet on the fiat of just one judge and the abstention of higher courts, we decided to end this woman’s life.

Is this how justice is served in this country?