"I urge all those who honor Terry Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life where all Americans are valued and protected."
--President George W. Bush

"I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing God has brought to us is Terry Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America."
--House Majority Leader Tom DeLay

This piece really has very little to do with Terri Schiavo. I do not intend to address the medical facts of the case, the ethics of Ms. Schiavo's feuding family, or Congress' drunken stumble into the territory of medicine and judicial process. Rather, I mean to examine a peculiar phrase which Ms. Schiavo's death and dying brought to the forefront of our national consciousness. I'm speaking, of course, of the infamous and ill-defined "culture of life," as it is used by President Bush.

I am concerned that the President's use of this phrase in the context of Ms. Schiavo's death represents a calculated effort to exploit an ethically difficult, tragic event for political gain in much the same way he has benefited from the deep divide in America over abortion. Because of the vagary inherent in any definition or understanding of life's beginning and end, abortion and cases such as Ms. Schiavo's are deeply polarizing. There are many good people on both sides of these issues, however, and even if we never come to an agreement on abortion or Ms. Schiavo, we should recognize that we share a respect for human life, that we share a desire to protect human life, and that we share the drive to enrich human life. Though the President uses the phrase "culture of life" to politically divide us just as he used the phrase "axis of evil" to neatly divide the world into friends and enemies, Americans of all political persuasions will find that their desire to "build a culture of life," in deed as well as in word, can lead to moments of unlikely agreement and cooperation.

Before Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube was removed, President Bush used the phrase "culture of life" to win anti-abortion votes. In August of 2004, the Whitehouse created a document entitled George W. Bush: Record of Achievement. The fifteenth chapter of this campaign tome is relevantly titled Promoting a Culture of Life, and consists of nine bullet points. One of these bullet points lauds the President for calling on Congress to pass legislation banning human cloning. Another bullet point praises the President for creating a bioethics council. The seven remaining points all contain at least one of the following words or phrases: "abortion;" "injury to a child in the womb;" "embryonic stem cells;" unborn children;" and "maternity group homes for women in crisis." There is no mention of end of life issues, or of the Schiavo case, which was then a matter of considerable political interest to the President's brother. Similarly, on the day Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube was finally removed, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay explicitly linked the Schiavo case with anti-abortion efforts. He told the Family Research Council, "It is more than just Terri Schiavo. This is a critical issue for people in this position and it is also a critical issue to fight that fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion."

Although the President utilizes a life-affirming rhetoric when he stands to gain political support by exploiting the abortion debate, his policies have not fostered a culture of life, but rather a deeply divided America that allows its soldiers to wage an unjust war, that allows an imperfect judicial system to put men and women to death, and that allows corporations to exploit the environment at the expense of human lives.

A culture of life cannot also be a culture that rushes to war, and the calculated sacrifice of innocent lives demanded by a policy of preemptive war is specifically contrary to a life-affirming ethic. Though President Bush claimed, in announcing the launch of the Iraq war, that "coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm," and although he claimed at the end of "major combat operations" that "The use of force has been and remains our last resort," to date, 1,520 U.S. soldiers and an estimated 17,136-19,696 Iraqis have lost their lives.

It is clear that Saddam Hussein did not present a legitimate, imminent threat to American lives. Even if the President's claim that faulty intelligence convinced him otherwise is to be believed, he acted to kill Iraqis, including innocent victims of Saddam Hussein's brutality, before an act of violent Iraqi aggression had made it clear that a defensive war was truly our last remaining resort. This amounts to human sacrifice in the name of self-defense. A culture of life regards all human life as equally valuable regardless of citizenship. Such a culture, if it is to be consistent, sees human sacrifice, even as an oblation to the gods of terrorism, to be immoral.

On the domestic front, the President's views regarding the death penalty are inconsistent with his statements on the Schiavo case. Regarding Ms. Schiavo, Scott McClellan, the President's spokesman, said, "This is a complex case, and the President believes in a situation like this, we should always err on the side of life." Yet, in 2000, after five-and-a-half years as the governor of Texas, soon-to-be-President Bush had signed the death warrants of 134 convicts. At the same historical moment, another Republican Governor, George Ryan of Illinois, issued a moratorium on executions in his state. Governor Ryan explained his decision by noting that, "Thirteen people [on death row] have been exonerated and twelve have been put to death" under the Illinois system of capital punishment, and he correctly concluded that, "There is a flaw in the system, without question, and it needs to be studied."

Surely, therefore, erring on the side of life means rejecting capital punishment. A culture which respects human life recognizes human limitations, and refuses to ignore the possibility of human error. There is no redress for an innocent who has been put to death, and no earthly judicial process so sound as to eliminate all wrongful convictions. I'd also like to discuss the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bush, and highlight its recent Clean Air Mercury Rule. Mercury is a pollutant whose sources of introduction into the environment include coal burning power plants. After mercury enters a body of water, it is ingested by microorganisms who metabolize it to methylmercury. Small fish then eat the contaminated microorganisms, and since methylmercury remains in fatty tissues, it gets passed up the food chain, becoming more concentrated with each link, all the way up to large predators like humans. Pregnant and nursing women can then pass methylmercury on to their developing fetuses and infants. This is a problem, because, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, methylmercury is a neurotoxin. Fetuses and infants exposed to relatively small unsafe amounts of the substance show "small decreases in IQ or effects on the brain that may only be determined by the use of very sensitive neuropsychological testing." Damage resulting from high exposure ranges from a delay in reaching "developmental milestones such as the age of first walking and talking, to more severe effects including brain damage with mental retardation, incoordination, and inability to move."

With these facts gnawing at the part of my brain in a constant panic over the state of the world, I admit that I was initially relieved to hear that, on March 15, 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency issued President Bush's Clean Air Mercury Rule. After all, mercury in the environment is bad, so a rule designed to reduce mercury emissions from coal burning power plants by 70% must be good, right?

Not if you believe New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey and the eight other state Attorneys General who have joined him in filing suit against the federal government. These nine states claim that, in issuing the new rule, "The EPA is putting private profit ahead of public health." The crux of their argument is that, in exempting power plants from the Clean Air Act, the new rule actually weakens mercury emission standards. Mr. Harvey states, "A strict MACT [Maximum Achievable Control Technology] standard, as required by the Clean Air Act, would reduce mercury emissions to levels approximately three times lower than the cap established in the new EPA rule." Furthermore, "cap and trade" provisions in the new rule give big polluters the option of buying pollution credits from clean plants that operate under the allowed quota of mercury emission. Although this may in fact create an economic incentive for some plants to reduce emissions below mandated levels, Mr. Harvey notes that it will also "allow some power plants to actually increase mercury emissions, creating hot spots of mercury deposition and threatening communities."

In other words, the Clean Air Mercury Rule allows more mercury to enter our water than previous regulations, which means that more human fetuses and infants will be injured. Such a policy's adverse effects are felt to different degrees by different populations. Communities surrounding power plants whose mercury emissions increase will be particularly devastated, as will poor rural communities that depend on fishing for nourishment. For example, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry points to a study of eleven Native American subsistence fishing communities in Alaska that found fish consumption in these communities to be 16.8 times that of the American average . The current administration's environmental policy can therefore be seen to be, at least in this instance, harmful to human health, discriminatory by place of residence, and discriminatory by means of subsistence. Such a policy is hardly consistent with a culture of life.

I'm not the first to point out the dissonance of the President's policies and his rhetoric. Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post, for example, noted that the term "culture of life" was coined, not by President Bush, but by Pope John Paul II. While the late pontiff and the President may have seen eye to eye on abortion and Ms. Schiavo, the Pope vocally opposed the war in Iraq and the death penalty . The religious rhetoric is understandable, however, when one considers the tremendous role religious voters played in the President's reelection. The Washington Post drew particular attention to the American Evangelical Christian community when it stated, "Nearly four out of five white evangelical Christians voted last year for President Bush, constituting more than a third of all votes cast for him according to the Pew Research Center."

Yet it is from the American Evangelical movement that an opportunity for political cooperation between liberals and conservatives has emerged. The National Association of Evangelicals recently released its Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. The group justifies its involvement in politics by saying, "To restrict our stewardship to the private sphere would be to deny an important part of [Jesus'] dominion and to functionally abandon it to the Evil One." The document contains statements against same-sex marriage and abortion, but it also makes the following two statements:

"We are not the owners of creation, but its stewards, summoned by God to 'watch over and care for it' (Gen. 2:15). This implies the principle of sustainability: our uses of the Earth must be designed to conserve and renew the Earth rather than to deplete or destroy it."

"We urge government to encourage fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, encourage sustainable use of natural resources, and provide for the proper care of wildlife and their natural habitats."

The associated Evangelical Environmental Network is even more specific in promoting "creation care." Among their projects is a campaign that advocates walking and biking to work, along with the purchase of fuel-efficient vehicles. The effort is titled "What Would Jesus Drive?", and it makes the claim that "the Risen Lord Jesus cares about what we drive." The EEN also is working to educate and involve interested Christians in the fight against mercury pollution. The group does so using the language of the anti-abortion movement, saying, "Many Christians are unaware of an important threat to the unborn child that must be addressed: Mercury Pollution." The group goes so far as to recommend the clean air bill of recent Republican turncoat Jim Jeffords.

The struggle against mercury pollution thus has the potential to unite conservative Christians, who may be motivated by a religious obligation to act as stewards of creation and by an anti-abortion conviction that extends to protecting fetuses from pollution, with liberal environmentalists, who may be motivated by anti-corporate fervor or even a neo-paganist worldview, and who may very well define themselves as "pro-choice." Ideally, both groups would realize that, despite disparate motivations, they share a common goal, and that goal is most easily achieved through cooperation. The danger is that the two groups are so isolated from one another, and have been so dehumanized to one another, that they will never learn they share a common interest.

When the President uses "culture of life" in speaking on abortion or end-of-life decisions, he intimates that those who disagree with his policies are working to build some sort of culture of death. I oppose the President's war in Iraq, I oppose the President's policy on capital punishment, and I oppose the Clean Air Mercury act, but I am not a member of the culture of death, and doubt that any such culture exists. When the President invokes a "culture of life," he mines what may be the deepest and most emotional trench dividing American society, and in neatly dividing the country into a culture of life and a culture of death, into a nation that only exists as pro-life and pro-choice, he makes it difficult for us to call him to account when we agree that his policies fail to protect, respect, and enrich life.

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