Bobby Schindler, brother of the late Terri Schiavo, called out MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann at yesterday's March for Life for labeling Terri's death “legally and morally correct” on Jan. 6 and used his comments to warn others about the news media.
Schindler told the thousands of pro-life activists gathered on the National Mall:
If you become our friends and supporters, the secular media will hate you. Just this past month former sports reporter and MSNBC host Keith Olbermann viciously attacked a prominent supporter of Terri. Keith Olbermann had the audacity to say that Terri's death was the “legally and morally correct” thing to do.
But Schindler's description of his sister's death, which came about after the removal of her feeding tube, should be enough to make anyone wonder about Olbermann's sense of morality:
My sister Terri Schiavo died a cruel and barbaric death that no family should ever have to witness. Let me tell you, her two-week dehydration death was horrifying. Watching blood pool in her eyes as she was deliberately killed by court order, my family decided her death would not be in vain.
Olbermann made his comments about Schiavo during “Countdown,” Jan. 6 in which he awarded Tom McCluskey, vice-president for government affairs at Family Research Council, the bronze in his nightly “Worst Person in the World” segment:
The bronze tonight to Tom McCluskey, vice president of James Dobson's lobbying outfit Family Research Council, protesting the nomination of Thomas Perrelli by the president-elect to become the number three man at the Justice Department. Why? Because Perrelli was one of the lawyers who represented Michael Schiavo as he tried to end the Gothic nightmare induced by the far right, as he struggled to have a court order enforced to remove the breathing tube from his wife, Terri, whose brain function has ceased.
The careers of Senate Majority Bill Frist and his House counter-part Tom Delay crashed in large part because they took this private tragedy into Congress and exploited it politically, even as 70 percent of this country told them to stop their cynical manipulation of this beleaguered family. Now these Dobsonian theocrats are protesting an appointment at the Justice Department because the man was on the morally and legally correct side of the debate.
Colleen Raezler is a research assistant for the Culture and Media Institute, a division of the
