The growing cult of death won a victory in the battle to devalue life with the judicial murder of Terri Schiavo. Sentenced to die on hearsay alone, for no crime greater than being brain-damaged and voiceless, Terri slowly starved to death while nutrition and water were withheld from her by court order. Every attempt to reverse the court's decision or alter Terri's state-sanctioned fate was blocked by the judicial system, a system that has lost any right to use the word "justice."

For decades, the pro-death secularist Liberals have been whittling away at the respect for life we once held. They have openly supported anti-life policies, from abortions without parental notification to late-term abortions of viable babies to the "right to die" of people who aren't actually dying. Now, with the death of Terri Schiavo, they have turned the judiciary into a vehicle for killing off the unwanted as well as the unborn. We have been taught to accept death as an easy solution, not an inevitability to be put off as long as possible. Adversity is not something to be faced with courage. Death is merely a "choice," like whether to order chicken or veal.

Once upon a time, before our judicial system decided that unborn children were "nonpersons" with no more right to live than a tapeworm, a judgment like that handed down by Judge Greer would have been impossible. If American culture still had the reverence for life it had just 40 years ago, mercy and reason would have tempered Greer's decision, instead of this soulless strictness about adhering to the letter of the law above all. It wouldn't and shouldn't have been merely a question of who had the right to kill Terri, but whether it was right to do so at all. The slow erosion of our values has coarsened us the to the point where many of us shrug off the deliberate killing of a helpless person by our courts as "probably for the best." This apathetic attitude persists despite the fact that the person in question was in no danger of dying, and had a family willing to care for her for the rest of her life.

In this struggle to weaken our sense of right and wrong, activist judges have taken upon themselves power they were never intended to have. Thomas Jefferson warned us that renegade judges could be a danger to liberty, though even he never imagined they would be a danger to life itself. "To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one that would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy," he wrote in 1820. Time and again we have seen laws written by the elected representatives of the people simply thrown out because they don't suit a particular judge's agenda. Many times judges have dictated to the legislature what laws they should write, as in the case of the Massachusetts Supreme Court ordering the legislature to write a law allowing gay marriage within six months.

Judges tend to support each other to preserve their collective power, as was shown by all the courts involved in the Schiavo case simply ruling that proper procedures were followed without actually looking at the facts and testimony, or calling for up-to-date tests. Even when the Congress of the United States, in a vain attempt to prevent Terri Schiavo's constitutional rights to due process from being violated by the Florida judiciary, passed a law requiring a de novo review of the case, Judge Whittemore of the US District court simply reviewed the procedures again, as had all the judges before him.

Jefferson cautioned that judges would be "constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric." The respect our legal system once held for life, the mercy and protection our laws afforded the innocent and helpless were integral to that fabric, now picked apart by judicial activism. We may be a nation of laws, but we are no longer a nation of justice.