The row over Terri Schiavo's right to life has invigorated the Christian right, uniting Catholics and evangelists, writes Conor O'Clery, in Pinellas Park, Florida
The protest camp outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo's life waned all this week stretches along a wide grass verge on each side of the gated entrance. The people in the two narrow enclosures, fenced in by plastic orange netting erected by police, hold up scores of placards for the benefit of camera crews penned in at the other side of the narrow road. Some display simple messages such as "Auschwitz USA". Others are more elaborate, including one with a portrait of Our Lady and the words, "Even Jesus had to receive nourishment from his mother".
On a trestle table beside an overflowing rubbish bin stands a two-foot statue of the Blessed Virgin surrounded by candles. Terri Schiavo is a Catholic and most of the crowd outside the hospice in Pinellas Park in Florida is made up of Catholics and evangelists. Here and there people kneel praying.
Five women finger beads as they intone the Sorrowful Mysteries while nearby, Betty Holden, a local Baptist, prays aloud to her friends: "Oh Lord, our hearts are full of sadness, we all call out to you to save Terri." They pause to look skywards and cheer as a biplane drones overhead trailing a slogan "Governor Bush - rescue Terri now".
The most dominant figure in the crowd is a man in a black suit with wavy brown hair, who alternates between giving press conferences and shouting instructions through a megaphone. This is Randall Terry, an evangelical Protestant and head of Operation Rescue.
He is a professional protester who uses civil disobedience to oppose abortion and has a record of 40 arrests and a year in jail for his anti-abortion activities. The last time I saw him was at a women's rights march in Washington last year where he and other counter-demonstrators held up giant colour photographs of aborted foetuses to taunt the women. He now officially represents Bob and Mary Schindler, the parents of Terri Schiavo, whose desperate struggle to keep their daughter alive has galvanised the right-to-life movement in the United States.
I ask Randall Terry what he meant when he said earlier on television that if Terri Schiavo dies "there's going to be hell to pay", but he declines to elaborate. He hints, however, at political retribution against legislators who "used pro-life rhetoric to get into power" and judges who have undone the "work of a generation to get a pro-life judiciary".
Terry calls through the megaphone for volunteers to go to the state capital, Tallahassee, several hours' drive away to picket the home of Governor Jeb Bush who failed in a last-ditch legal attempt to take Terri into protective custody.
"We'll drive through the night for a vigil at the governor's mansion," he calls out. "We have a nice comfortable bus with television. Please, who will offer up Good Friday for God and for Terri's suffering." A dozen hands go up.
"Will you count for me?" he asks, but I tell him he should get someone else.
Would-be passengers queue at a table where Mari Fernandez, a local Catholic activist, takes their names. She gives me a printout from www.newsmax.com, one of about 100 websites devoted to the Terri Schiavo issue. It quotes the testimony of a nurse, Heidi Law, who tended to Schiavo in the mid-1990s, that she fed her Jell-O which she swallowed and "enjoyed immensely". It says another nurse, Carla Sauer Iyer, testified that Terri Schiavo spoke on a regular basis, uttering such things as "Mommy" and "Help me" but that her husband Michael Schiavo would come in and say "Has she died yet? When is that bitch gonna die?"
Their testimony is contradicted by doctors who have diagnosed Terri to be in a persistent vegetative state, unable to talk, swallow, think, remember or feel pain. The demonisation of Michael Schiavo is a major element in the drama played out in this densely populated county on Florida's Gulf coast. Right-to-life activists dismiss his assertion that she would not have wanted to live on life support.
THE CRISIS HAS been simmering since Terri Schiavo, an attractive and vivacious 26-year-old who suffered from bulimia, an eating disorder, collapsed in her home on February 25th, 1990. A possible potassium imbalance temporarily stopped her heart and cut off oxygen to the brain. She could only afterwards be kept alive with nourishment pumped into her stomach through her belly-button.
In November 1992 Michael Schiavo won more than $1 million (€771,830) in a malpractice suit. He received $300,000 (€231,000) and $700,000 (€540,000) was ordered to be spent on Terri's care - of which some $50,000 (€38,000) is left. Michael and the Schindlers fell out when they demanded a share of the $300,000 for helping the couple to move from New Jersey to Florida, and he refused, but until recently they had not challenged the diagnosis that Terri had no hope of recovery from a vegetative state.
In July 1993, Terri's parents tried to have Michael removed as her guardian. They failed, but renewed their efforts as Michael set up home with a new partner with whom he now has two children.
On February 11th, 2000, Florida state judge George Greer approved a request from Michael Schiavo for the removal of the feeding tube, based on his testimony that Terri had once told him that she would not wish to live in such a state. After legal challenges from the parents were dismissed, the tube was removed in April 2001, but two days later it was reinserted on the order of another judge. In November 2002, on hearing new medical testimony, Judge Greer again ordered the tube removed and this occurred after legal delays on October 31st, 2003. Governor Bush hastily signed a bill allowing him to intervene, and after six days armed police escorted Terri back to the hospital where the tube was reinserted.
The Florida Supreme Court then struck down the law as unconstitutional and Judge Greer ordered the tube removed once more. It was taken out on March 18th. After the US Congress rushed through a bill last weekend allowing an appeal to federal courts, a series of federal judges - up to the US Supreme Court - refused to reverse Judge Greer's order.
Michael Schiavo denies the charges bandied about by the protesters - that he spent the compensation and will collect insurance money on Terri's death. "There is no money, I will receive not a penny," he told ABC Nightline.
The fury of the right, sometimes expressed in vicious terms, is also directed against the judges who sided with Michael Schiavo. They are "scum", raves Michael Savage, host of the syndicated Savage Nation talk show. He tells listeners that they have taken "the first step to Germany in the 1930s" and that the treatment of Terri Schiavo is worse than that of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He also lashes out at President George Bush and his brother, Governor Jeb Bush, heroes earlier in the week for trying to reverse the court decisions.
"Jeff Bush is a hypocrite," he fumes. "George Bush is a hypocrite. They are full of crap," they acted only to "excite their conservative base". President Bush, who campaigned on a promise to promote "the culture of life", now faces a conservative backlash for failing to take executive action in a family matter.
There is anger too outside the hospice against the police on duty who have instructions not to let anyone attempt to give nourishment to Terri Schiavo. A Christian broadcaster tells me, "I can't believe I live in a country where the police have to stop a dying woman getting a drink of water".
On Wednesday officers handcuffed a family group who made a symbolic attempt to bring water to Terri Schiavo's room overlooking a shaded courtyard at the back of the hospice.
THE CASE HAS become a huge issue for the Christian right. It has helped consolidate a new unity between Catholics and evangelists that has been forged in the anti-abortion cause. Catholics and evangelists are also today working together to oppose stem-cell research, same-sex marriage and euthanasia, and to promote sexual abstinence education, though differences remain over capital punishment which the US Catholic bishops oppose.
This contrasts with the old antagonisms that led to strong Protestant opposition to the election of John F Kennedy, the US's first Catholic president, on the grounds that he would do the Pope's bidding. The conservative Vatican is now an ally and the Pope an icon to evangelicals.
Several anti-abortion groups with Protestant and Catholic members have descended on Pinellas Park to organise the resistance. Life Legal Defence Foundation is paying the bills for the legal actions taken by Schiavo's parents.
Fr Thomas Euteneuer of Human Life International in Virginia joined the protest during the week. Operation Rescue and the Catholic Medical Association have also pitched in. First-generation Irish-American Noel Naughton, of Chicago's Pro Life Action, came from Chicago to picket against what he calls "the beginning of organised euthanasia". But not all the 100 or so people milling around are opposed to what is happening to Terri Schiavo. Sasha Raymond, an English literature student from nearby Dunedin, is intensely dismayed at the protest. "I feel these people are in a make-believe world and it's nothing to do with Terri any more," she confides in a low voice.
A man gives journalists a printout from the MSNBC website quoting Fr John Paris, a Boston College professor, who maintains that it is ethically acceptable to remove medical intervention from someone in a persistent vegetative state and that "this is not a fight about a feeding tube in a woman in Florida, this is a fight about the political power of the Christian right".
An anti-war activist, insurance agent Barbara Sieling, arrives carrying a placard with the words "Stop the killing in Iraq". "Fundamentalists are trying to take over our government," she tells me as a few boos ring out. "Some of these pro-life people are pro-war and for the death penalty. They can't have it all."