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TIA Daily Feature Article

9. From Shindler to Sheehan

How Two Mothers Demonstrate the Convergence of Faith and Feelings

by Robert Tracinski

For the next issue of TIA Monthly, I have recently been finishing up a feature article on the life of Pope John Paul II and the Terri Schiavo case--and what they show, philosophically, about the relationship between faith and freedom. Along with the unenviable task of slogging through long, poorly written papal encyclicals, this work emerged me back into some of TIA Daily's coverage of the Terri Schiavo case. And while reading through the details of that case--particularly stories about Mary Schindler, Terri Schiavo's mother, who fought against the court ruling which ended her daughter's living death--I got an eerie feeling of deja vu.

I was reminded of the whole "feel" of Schindler's campaign: her maudlin, emotional appeals to the "special bond" between mother and child; her imputing of her own religious views onto her daughter, contrary to evidence about her daughter's actual views; her unscrupulous campaign to smear Michael Schiavo as a wife abuser and murderer; her willingness to ally herself with any crazy fanatic or showboating politician, from abortion-clinic bombers to Jesse Jackson; her apparent enjoyment of the role of the victimized mother and the time it gave her in the spotlight--and, above all, the willingness of conservatives to play along with this circus, as when Daniel Henninger, in the March 25 Wall Street Journal (see http://tinyurl.com/5boo7) came out in favor of "her poor mother, whose connection to her child-like daughter is more authentic and earned than anything that existed between Terri and Michael Schiavo."

Does any of that feel familiar?

Today, down in Texas, we have another mother, who is demanding an American surrender in Iraq, and her campaign has exactly the same "feel": her maudlin, emotional appeals to her grief over her lost son; her imputing of her own political views onto him, contrary to evidence about his actual intentions; her unscrupulous campaign to smear President Bush as a liar and "terrorist"; her willingness to ally herself with any crazy fanatic or showboating politician, including open terrorist sympathizers; her apparent enjoyment of the role of the victimized mother and the time it gives her in the spotlight--and this time, it is liberals who are playing along with this circus, as when Maureen Dowd, in her August 10 New York Times column (now only available in their pay-per-article archive), granted Cindy Sheehan an "absolute moral authority"--never mind the views of the thousands of other parents and spouses who have lost loved ones in this war.

Cindy Sheehan, in short, is the left's answer to Mary Schindler. And the circus surrounding both women is equally nauseating.

The common element is clear: each case is a pure, raw appeal to emotion. And worse, this is not an appeal to the viewer's _own_ emotional reaction--that is, it is not an attempt to elicit the viewer's own spontaneous evaluation in response to certain facts. Rather, it is an utterly second-handed appeal: it is an appeal to Mary Shindler's or Cindy Sheehan's emotions, on the expectation that this other person's emotions should influence or outweigh our own conclusions and evaluations.

This is another demonstration of the way in which the left and right support each other. Of course, the left and right disagreed in their evaluations of the two women and their causes. The left dismissed Mary Schindler, while the right reviles Cindy Sheehan. But both sides are united in their method: when it comes to issues that form the core of their agenda, they think that emotion overrules reason. And for each side, this is an ineradicable part of their basic philosophy: for the subjectivist left, emotion is a metaphysical issue, since emotions are the shapers of reality; for the religious right, emotions are a mystical tie to God, who is the creator of the world and the source of moral law.

And so, for all of the disagreement of the two camps on specific applications, these two women show us the convergence of the seemingly opposite methodologies of religion and subjectivism, of faith and feelings.