When DeLay's Father Lay in a Coma, Tom Joined Family Decision to Let the Man Die

From the Los Angeles Times as highlighted by the Daily Kos' Armando and EZ Writer:

CANYON LAKE, Texas — A family tragedy unfolding in a Texas hospital during the fall of 1988 was a private ordeal -- without judges, emergency sessions of Congress or the raging debate outside Terri Schiavo's Florida hospice.

The patient then was a 65-year-old drilling contractor, badly injured in a freak accident at his home. Among the family standing vigil at Brooke Army Medical Center was a grieving junior congressman -- U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

A comment there tells us that the Franciscan Brothers of Peace who have been so vocal on insisting Terri Schiavo is alive removed their group's spiritual leader from life support after he sustained irreversible damage.

But let's not lose sight of one thing: while there is obvious hypocrisy and unclean motives in all this business on the part of DeLay and perhaps even these so-called brothers (whose tactics have been a might weird), the more important issue is that DeLay's family and these brothers GOT TO DECIDE. But this is a decision they are unwilling to allow Michael Shiavo, his wife's guardian, to make. They question his motivation, villify him personally, and engage in the very rhetoric that helped put a bullseye on this grieving man's back.

In this respect, the Schiavo case is very much like the abortion debate in this country. Anti-choice rallies and marches are filled with people who made choices about whether to proceed with pregnancies in their own families (many of the most outspoken talk of their experience as being either a woman who aborted or the significant other of a woman who did), but they're hell bent on making sure others do not have the same right of choice.