The most important lesson to come out of the Terri Schiavo brouhaha has been that you should leave very explicit instructions about what to do if your brain should die while your body lives on. So let me be the latest to join in that chorus and give you some good advice: Make a living will. There has also been another largely overlooked lesson from the case: The way it underscores the case for same-sex marriage.
Irrespective of one's position on poor Terri Schiavo, everyone can agree that someone needs to be able to speak for her. Some people side with her parents, believing Terri would want to live; some agree with her husband that she would want to die. But no one disagrees that her family should be consulted.
If Terri were homosexual, however, her partner would not have even the most basic access to her in a medical facility. Even at the end of a lifetime spent together, her partner would be denied the right to make basic medical decisions under most state laws. That would be a travesty and would only compound the tragedy her family must endure.
In the Schiavo case, the husband is against life support, but that hardly means those who support it think spouses should not have the ability to make medical decisions. Indeed, it's easy to imagine a situation in which the positions are reversed and it's the spouse who seeks prolonged life.
Medical decisions are among the most personal and private any family ever makes. Access to loved ones in hospitals and hospices is an essential part of the healing-or grieving-process. To deny this most basic of rights based on the gender of a person's partner is an offense against human dignity and autonomy. Terri Schiavo's plight powerfully demonstrates the need to leave these most personal of decisions within the family.
Note that this argument for same-sex marriage follows a traditional liberal mold. It identifies the practical problems with banning same-sex marriage and calls attention to the moral imperative to help people suffering through their partner's death. The traditional conservative counterargument is framed solely in moral terms-homosexuals shouldn't be able to marry, not because it will hurt anyone in a concrete or particularized way, but because homosexuality is immoral. A sense of public morality is all the justification such a law needs to the conservative mind.
This pattern holds true in arguments over public morality generally. Conservatives are unconcerned with pragmatic justifications for their policies because their morality is all they need. Liberals' arguments, by contrast, rest not only on a sense of what is right, but on a sense of the real world, too. An instructive example is abstinence education.
A recent study by Columbia and Yale found that teens pledging abstinence until marriage are just as likely as others to contract sexually transmitted diseases. This may be because they're more likely to engage in anal and oral sex than their counterparts, and less likely to use condoms or get tested for STDs when they do so. To a liberal, this suggests that just telling kids not to have sex doesn't work. They just do it anyway, without protection.
Thus, pragmatic considerations weigh in favor of liberal sexual education and easy availability of condoms. Further, liberals promote the normative ideas that sex is natural and healthy, and it's wise to make the healthy choice and use protection. This is a moral idea: Sex is OK, and the main goal of sexual education is to avoid STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
Conservatives, unsurprisingly, disagree. They may know that many kids who pledge abstinence have sex anyway, but they don't regard this as any reason to conform sexual education programs to people's actual behavior. The argument goes like this: Sex before marriage is wrong, and it's wrong to do anything which sends the message that it's right. This includes, of course, promoting safe sex.
By conveying an abstinence-only message, they say, society does the right thing. By obeying that message, teenagers do the right thing, too. It's not society's fault if some of them fail to live up to their moral responsibility. Society's responsibility is only to show them the right way to live. Thus, the fact that they're in unnecessary danger of contracting STDs is irrelevant. This is also a moral idea: Premarital sex is not okay, and the main goal of sexual education is to eliminate it.
It's obvious that the first option is the better one. It's all well and good to disagree about whether premarital sex is acceptable. It's neither well nor good to let teens engage in risky behavior if simple countermeasures like condoms and STD screening could help them stay healthy. Thus, although I do believe that sex is both natural and healthy, I argue that nonideological, pragmatic considerations also suggest the liberal perspective is correct on both sexual education and gay marriage. Morality is a personal consideration, and public policy should also be based on facts gleaned from the real world.
opinion@dailycardinal.com.
