duggan 8-28-2014
By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The familiar media line that Tea Party activists are fiscal-focused libertarians who reject social conservatism was disproven again when a nationally active pro-life official spoke to the regular evening meeting of a Phoenix Tea Party.
Dana Cody, an attorney and executive director of the California-based Life Legal Defense Foundation (lldf.org), spoke to the Arizona Project Tea Party gathering on August 25 at its meeting room in a strip mall about her organization’s new Life Legal Guardians project.
People need to be proactive about their health care, she said, in an age when ending people’s lives is done through the use of transformed terminology.
“Euthanasia” ten years ago has become “protocol” today, Cody illustrated with a video.
“How many of you are aware that food and water are considered ‘medical treatment’” that can be withheld these days, she said, adding, “Organ donation is a huge industry.”
Major media stories often portray social conservatives as outsiders rejected by both Tea Partiers and the Republican establishment.
An August 16 Washington Post story had a familiar ring when it said that “many social conservatives” “feel out of place in a GOP increasingly dominated by Tea Party activists and libertarians who prefer to focus on taxes and the role of government” rather than “moral issues.”
However, serious observers who follow mainstream Tea Party activists should know that one of their major concerns is to reverse the moral decline of the United States.
Along with flags and patriotic decorations on the Arizona Project meeting room’s walls is a large picture centered on Jesus Christ holding the U.S. Constitution. Surrounding him are Americans down through the nation’s history.
The evening’s meeting began with a prayer and a salute to the U.S. flag.
After Cody spoke to the Arizona Project, the chairman of that group, Ron Ludders, told The Wanderer in an interview:
“I think tonight is a prime example of what social conservatives are. . . . .I don’t need a newspaper telling me whether I’m a social conservative or a fiscal conservative. I happen to be both. . . .
“I’ve always known who I am, and I know my issues and I know the people who surround me, and they are social and economic conservatives,” Ludders continued. “The media who determine what stories are going to run have seldom or ever contacted local [Tea Party] facilitators for their opinions.”
Ludders proceeded to bring up one of the central issues of “social conservatives”: “I don’t know how anybody could do an abortion.”
He said that “two of the most precious things that God has given us — one is the right to life, the other is the freedom to determine…what we wish to do with that gift.”
Cupping his hands as if holding an infant, Ludders recalled his awe at holding his own firstborn child.
In a separate interview with The Wanderer, guest speaker Cody expressed similar disbelief in media claims about Tea Partiers’ alleged attitudes.
“I don’t know any Tea Party member that isn’t right-to-life, or doesn’t believe in rights of conscience,” Cody said. “…I just don’t believe the media.”
When “mainstream media interviews me,” she said, they debate her or argue with her instead of asking her to state her views.
“If you want to know what I have to say, then talk to me,” she said. “. . . Reporters would call me and argue with me about embryonic stem-cell research.”
Be Prepared
Speaking to the Arizona Project meeting, Cody warned that people shouldn’t wait until a situation arises that could cause problems for receiving medical care.
Today, she said, “people are treated like furniture and not like human beings. . . . We want people to be proactive, we want people to be prepared. . . . Hopefully, you’ll be interested in meeting with attorneys” to get personal instructions and affairs in order.
She distributed a Life Legal leaflet to the audience titled, “Make your health-care decisions, or they will be made for you. A guide to protecting yourself and your loved ones.”
Cody also handed out the summer issue of Life Legal’s quarterly newsletter, LifeLine, which includes her up-front article about Life Legal Guardians.
“If one is paying attention,” the article says, “he or she can see an ominous train of thought growing very fast in the culture. I say ‘paying attention’ because in many ways it is imperceptible. It used to wear the face of ‘compassion,’ then ‘my rights’ or ‘my choice.’ Today it wears the face of ‘protocol’.”
Life Legal Defense Foundation started in 1989, Cody said, when pro-life “rescues” at abortion clinics were prevalent, and attorneys saw pro-lifers and their freedom of speech being abused at locations including public sidewalks and colleges.
However, she said, the organization’s focus expanded to include the elderly, chronically ill and disabled, and euthanasia.
She told the Tea Partiers about Walter Hoye, a northern California pro-life black pastor who was jailed on contrived charges for peacefully offering to provide alternatives to pregnant women going for abortions. When Hoye wouldn’t promise to stay away from the clinic, Cody said, he was locked up.
However, she said, he was freed after serving 18 days of a 30-day sentence.
“Because of his courage with respect to that particular issue,” Cody said, “many people go out to the clinics now [to offer alternatives], and many lives are saved.”
The federal government’s Obamacare will cut medical costs by not providing care to elderly and disabled people, she said, adding later that Obamacare isn’t the cause of current trends against people’s lives, “but Obamacare will exacerbate the situation.”
On the question of prolonging life, Cody said she wasn’t talking about whether an ill person would get a respirator or a ventilator. “I’m talking about starving people to death.”
People should be careful about how words are used in medical instructions they prepare, she said, and they shouldn’t assume too much. “Is ‘extraordinary care’ defined in your document?…If your hospital is religious and you think you won’t have any problems, you [still] need to ask questions.”
She mentioned two widely reported cases of impaired patients’ loss of access to medical support — Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who was starved and dehydrated to death in 2005 by request of her husband, who had taken up with a different girlfriend, and Jahi McMath, the California teenager declared brain dead late last year, but whose family disputed the declaration and fought for her continued care, which they obtained.
McMath is still unconscious, Cody said, but “her body’s not deteriorating. She’s a 13-year-old going through puberty.” She’s currently in a care home, “and we hope she’ll wake up.”
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