It turns out Terry Schiavo's death wasn't the first step down a slippery slope, it was a head-first dive off of a deep precipice. This is what I, and many others, tried to get across -- morality means something. Denigrate the importance of morality in making hard life and death decisions and you demean the value of life.

This time it's Mae Magouirk, LaGrange, Ga., who faces death because a "loved one" wants to pull the plug while others who seem to actually care about her fight to keep her alive. Magouirk is neither terminally ill, comatose or in a vegetative state yet her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, who did not have guardianship over Magouirk, ordered doctors to remove her feeding tube despite the fact that Magouirk has a living will and it specifically said that fluids and nourishment were to be withheld only if she were either comatose or vegetative.

According to Magouirk's nephew, Ken Mullinax, Gaddy did all this without a valid power of attorney for her decisions. She did have a limited power of attorney that allowed her to handle some financial matters but it did not give her any say in her grandmother's treatment.

In general liberals tried to say that anyone who tried to stand up for Terri Schiavo and who was a conservative was a hypocrite because they supported the death penalty. I would turn that around and ask liberals who oppose the death penalty why they fight so hard for the life of someone who has killed others, and given half a chance would kill again, and yet they fought to kill Schiavo.

I get more than a few chuckles over the fact that liberals hate to be called liberal. They prefer to be called progressives or moderates, even though neither name is true. As Shakespeare would have said if he'd grown up in these parts "A skunk by any other name would stink as bad."

Liberals support killing both the extremely old and the extremely young, positions I abhor. Unless someone chooses to die I don't think anyone should ever have the power to make that choice for them. The unborn can't make that choice so they should be protected. Likewise the incapacitated who have not made a decision to have medical care withheld should be protected.

The Schiavo and the Magouirk cases may be extreme today but as we have seen over and over what is extreme today is mundane tomorrow. Take movies. When Sam Peckinpah began his blood-soaked directing career audiences were shocked by the amount of violence in them. Today a Peckinpah movie is somewhat quaint. The Kill Bill movies and other gore-fests spurt more fake blood than ever before and audiences can't seem to get enough. There are some people who love to wallow in their own crapulence and there are plenty of people in Hollywood willing to wallow right along with them and they'll try to drag the rest of us into the foulness with them. At some point you have to ask yourself: What's next? What will the Hollywood crowd come up with?

Magouirk's situation may not be as bad as Schiavo's. Her granddaughter is not the closest living relative and Magouirk has a living will that has to be obeyed, even if her other relatives have to go to court to enforce it, which they have.

The last thing I heard about her situation is that she has been airlifted to the University of Alabama -- Birmingham Medical Center where she is getting treatment, something no one should have denied her to begin with.

Unless we start backing away from the dangerous precedents that liberals have instituted and get back to being a God-fearing nation (of no particular denomination) we will find ourselves on the ash-heap of history along with all the European nations who have gone before us there because they lacked a moral compass to guide them.

It's obvious living wills, though a step in the right direction, aren't enough. We need tough laws to make sure that people have control over their own fates. We need to make sure that before anyone can even get the process started to terminate medical care, feeding tubes or other life-sustaining methods that the patient has expressed his/her intentions clearly, beyond a reasonable doubt and it is the patients wish to discontinue the treatment. Anything less and we are, in some small way, complicit in unjustifably killing someone.