What they did not anticipate was the reaction by the big majority of the population. Whether they cast a vote for Bush or Kerry, millions were disgusted by the scene of politicians debating in the halls of Congress a family’s most intimate—and difficult—personal decisions. It was seen by most for what it was: an outrageous and dangerous invasion of privacy by the state.

Bush’s electoral strategy of selling wolf tickets to the right wing while carrying out a mainstream social policy may have peaked with the Schiavo affair. The Bush administration carried out a similar maneuver last year when it peddled a constitutional ban on gay marriage that was bound to fail. The year before the White House weakly grandstanded in support of a challenge —decisively rejected by the Supreme Court—to an affirmative action program at the University of Michigan.

Some capitalist politicians and rightists accused the husband of Terri Schiavo, Michael, of being a money-grubbing, adulterous husband, and several claimed he was responsible for his wife’s tragic injury. These crude slanders—part of an “unseemly circus,” as the right-wing New York Post called it—were a feature of the public debate on this case, another sign of the continued coarsening of political discourse that marks bourgeois politics today.

Millions of people face difficult medical decisions when tragedy strikes a close family member. The notion that those choices could be taken out of the hands of the individuals most intimately involved and be adjudicated by the courts—or the state or even federal government—sticks in their craw, regardless of whether they are classified by bourgeois commentators as belonging to a “Red” or a “Blue” America.

Hard-fought struggles by millions, like the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and ’60s and the battles for women’s equality, have profoundly changed social attitudes toward the basic right of individuals to make decisions in private matters without government interference: from a woman’s right to choose abortion to the right of gays to be free from discrimination and harassment.

These popular social attitudes are not determined by which capitalist party someone may vote for in any given election, or what religious denomination they may subscribe to, if any, or what part of the United States they live in. Rather, they are a product of the deep-going conquests of the working class and its allies over the decades, and they strengthen our potential class power. Neither the Bush administration, nor the Democratic “opposition,” will have an easy time trying to take them back.
 
 
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‘Terri’s Law’ backfires on its sponsors  
 
 
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