It's Easter week again. Palm Sunday fell on the first day of spring, an auspicious coincidence given that this is the time that Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the gift of a new life that He gives to anyone who will come to Him for forgiveness and adoption into God's family. This should be a time of celebration and joy in the Christian community.

Instead, many of us are grieving over the fate of Terri Schiavo, a disabled woman who lies dying for lack of food and water at the orders of her husband and judges who insist that his word that his wife would want this is sufficient to order her slow, painful death. As of the time of this writing, Terri is still alive but weakening, deprived of food and water for about five days. Her frantic parents have lost in court after court and now are depending on the state governor to take her into protective custody to save her life.

I am alternately enraged, tearful, and horrified that anything like this could be done to a human being. This wouldn't be allowed for sick animals slated for destruction at the pound, and yet this is not even the first time that her so-called husband has gotten approval to try to kill his wife in this manner. That it was stopped before but so far not this time despite the desperate pleas of her family is a shocking indictment of the deterioration of our society and our courts in particular.

I am also troubled at the conflicting reports in the news about it. The liberal press is clearly lying to us about her medical state. They've even shown pictures of her where she is not on a respirator, able to breath without such assistance, yet they continue to show doctors who insist that she is in a hopeless vegetative state and that she is undergoing a peaceful, painless death.

Her parents and their doctors insist that Terri is responsive to a far greater degree and only needs a feeding tube to supply her with food and water. There have been reports that she was able to swallow soft food earlier while in this condition, but that was stopped by her husband along with anything else that he considered therapy. He has literally warehoused her, denying her any kind of therapy or stimulation that would help guide her back to a more active life.

There was a rush to try to give her and her family legislative relief in the Congress with the President promptly signing the necessary bill, only to have that relief blocked in the courts again. If there was ever an example of the liberal insanity in both philosophy and judicial judgment, this is it. Terri may literally have to be taken into protective custody to protect her not only from her husband but also from the courts and the liberals.

The liberal crowd has gathered to support him in his quest to kill Terri. This is the same crowd that shrieked in anguish against God for the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives in the tsunami, and yet now they are calling for the death of a single woman who can still express and receive love with her family. They'll rush out to save beached dolphins, carefully keeping them from dehydrating while they are taken back out to sea, and yet they won't even allow her ice chips to ease the dryness in her mouth. People who are trying to take her water are being arrested for even this small kindness.

We had the tsunami at Christmas time, and now this during the Easter week. What a difference in the reaction to human suffering! They piously proclaim that they wouldn't want to live like that, but their own media is deliberately lying about what her life is actually like.

It is the same kind of lies that they tell about abortion. They insist that the unborn babies killed by the various procedures available are not able to feel pain, indeed, aren't really human at all yet. They insist that Terri isn't really human either, just a living but brain-dead corpse being kept alive artificially with no chance of attaining human consciousness.

Terri has lived for many years without the extreme life support measures required to keep a person in that state alive despite brain death. She is disabled but not dying, merely requiring a feeding tube because she can't get food and water for herself. How many of us at the beginning and end of life need others to give this to us? How many disabled people of all ages require this help, yet do have lives that they would not give up. Her helplessness is no justification for assuming that she has no inner life that she would not want to keep.

I keep listening to the news hoping that she will be given relief soon. I look at the tiny sprouts beginning to come up in my garden and wonder if she still has a spark of life left after so many days. I look at the grape hyacinths joining the last of the daffodils and wonder how a world with such beauty can also have such ugliness. I remember the articles about how the Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers, even individuals whose bones showed that they were disabled and had to have been cared for by their relatives. I wonder how brutish we have become if we won't even allow a family to care for its own daughter.

Isn't there enough tragedy without deliberately causing another death through needless suffering? How can anyone possibly think that torturing a disabled woman to death through thirst and hunger could possibly be a mercy to her? Those who blamed God for the evil in the world at Christmas can look to their own hands and hearts for this.