Tragedy on the national stage: conservative intervention into the Terri Schiavo case was a disservice to everybody.

YOU COULD SAY THAT FOR A moment, the government of the United States stood still. In March 2005, congressional leaders pushed through a bill that was quite unprecedented in American history. They called it "Terri's Law"--and in a moment of high drama and international media attention, the president flew to Washington from his vacation in Texas just to sign it. The bill authorized the federal courts to intervene in the case of a Florida woman, Terri Schiavo. As doctors testified and the state courts ruled, Schiavo had been in a persistent vegetative state and beyond medical help for 15 years. At issue was the court-ordered removal of the feeding tube that was keeping her alive against her expressed wishes. Her case had been the subject of many rounds of litigation, much of it handled by religious-right legal groups. Political and media hijinks had marked the case for many years. At one point, the Florida legislature had authorized the governor to have the state police seize Schiavo to keep feeding her, and the governor had done so. As the end neared, Governor Jeb Bush almost did so again, but he stood down when the presiding judge made clear such action would cause a showdown between the branches of government. Ultimately, federal courts including the Supreme Court declined to intervene, and, Congressional action notwithstanding, Schiavo was allowed to die a dignified death on March 31, 2005.

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The end-of-life drama of Terri Schiavo was an international media sensation, a tabloid feeding frenzy with unintended consequences for Republican political leaders. They thought their extraordinary efforts to prolong the life of one helpless woman, said to be a victim of dark deeds and judicial indifference, would have wide public appeal. Instead, the case served as a wake-up call to many Americans regarding the threat to their privacy by the religious right and the politicians who pander to it.

Senate majority leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., who is also a heart surgeon, went so far as to cast doubt on the medical judgment of the many physicians who had examined Schiavo. In a speech on the Senate floor, Frist declared, "I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office." Frist was widely criticized for grandstanding, especially because he had not personally examined Schiavo and neurology was not his specialty. Senator Mel Martinez, R-Fla., accidentally gave a Democratic senator a talking-points memo drawn up by Martinez's staff. The memo made clear Martinez's intention to exploit the Schiavo affair for political advantage, stating, among other things, "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue."

But neither the courts of law nor the court of public opinion subscribed to theories of misdiagnosis or the like. Former senator and U.N. ambassador John Danforth, R-Mo., was so shocked at the extent to which sectarian doctrines were driving politics and policy in his own party that he wrote a book about it. The retired statesman and Episcopal priest spoke for most Americans when he wrote that the Schiavo episode constituted "Big Brotherism in the extreme, an exercise of the raw and awesome power of the federal government." This "was a threat to all the families that had seen their loved ones suffer through terminal illness," and people were "terrified that their own lives might someday be artificially extended in nightmarish circumstances," Danforth wrote. "It was a threat to some of our most heartfelt values."

Many wonder in retrospect how the tragic story of one woman and her family facing contentious, but not especially unusual, end-of-life issues became the most publicized end-of-life spectacle, and one of the tawdriest tabloid political dramas, in recent American history. As it happens, three of those most responsible were among the most militant and theatrical antiabortion activists in the world. These were men with a taste for the theater of the ghastly: Fr. Frank Pavone, Randall Terry, and Gary McCullough. Under their influence, Terri Schiavo's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, have termed her death "judicial murder."

Pavone, head of the militant antiabortion group Priests for Life, served as the Schindlers' "spiritual adviser" as the drama entered its final stages. Terry and McCullough, each of whom has been arrested dozens of times in connection with antiabortion extremism, served as spokesmen, with McCullough in particular serving as media relations specialist. Press accounts say the latter pumped out as many as six press releases a day to his list of 6,000 outlets during the peak of the affair.

Randall Terry is best-known as the mediagenic founder of Operation Rescue, the militant antiabortion group that staged massive and often violent demonstrations and criminal confrontations of abortion providers in the 1980s. It was a project of the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action Network, headed by Joe Scheidler. Terry, Pavone and McCullough are now all in their 40s. Back then, Terry was a young, charismatic, Evangelical Protestant; Scheidler was a Catholic seminary dropout and the central figure in the militant antiabortion movement. Scheidler's contacts ranged from the streets to the Vatican, and he played the role of diplomat to all factions, even as he primarily led street militancy. He visited convicted clinic bombers in jail and pleaded unsuccessfully for clemency for them from the White House.

Operation Rescue today is a ghost of its former self, thwarted by years of court injunctions and public revulsion at the violence that the movement spawned--hundreds of arsons and bombings, murders of doctors and clinic staff. The 1980s were marked by a rash of bombings and arsons, many committed by veterans of Operation Rescue. By the 1990s, Terry and others were calling for theocratic government and for armed insurrection against what they increasingly saw as a government and society that had fallen away from God's laws. In a characteristic speech in 1993, Terry declared, "Our goal is a Christian nation.... We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism.... Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules." In the same speech, Terry said, "If a Christian voted for [former President Bill] Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple."

A prepublication manuscript of a 1995 book by Terry, obtained by journalist Jonathan Hutson, called for Christians to rise up in bloody revolution. It was titled The Sword: The Blessing of Righteous Government and the Overthrow of Tyrants. On other occasions, Terry has waxed nostalgic for the American Revolution, when "real men fired real bullets at other real men who shed blood, died excruciating, real deaths, and left behind real grieving widows and orphans on both sides of the war." Throughout his career, Terry has arguably been more talk than action when it comes to violence, although many of his associates from Operation Rescue went on to commit violent crimes. Notable among these is James Kopp, who was convicted in the 1998 assassination of Dr. Barnett Slepian and is a suspect in several doctor shootings in Canada. In one of Terry's tawdrier episodes, he was arrested for presenting Bill Clinton with a dead fetus at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. Terry's taste for gruesome theatrics is shared by Pavone, who publicly displayed a dead fetus in Birmingham, Ala., last summer as part of a clinic protest. Pavone has been promising to provide a Christian burial to the fetus for some time now.

Since the heyday of Operation Rescue, Terry has fallen out of favor with much of the movement. He has been denounced by many of his former colleagues for abandoning his wife and children and taking up with another woman, whom he eventually married. He moved away from upstate New York and now fives in St. Augustine, Fla. He converted to Catholicism in 2006 during his unsuccessful Republican primary challenge to incumbent state senator Jim King. The Schiavo trio stuck together through that campaign, with McCullough doing media and Pavone campaigning and fundraising for his friend. Pavone said during the campaign, "I know you want strong pro-life legislators in government as much as I do. Frankly, you could not have a more proven and dedicated servant of life in office than Randall Terry."

Terry never publicly advocated violence against abortion providers, but his close friend and colleague of 25 years, McCullough, sure has. McCullough worked for Operation Rescue in 1989 under Terry. He gained public notice in 1993 as a media consultant for Paul Hill, a well-known clinic protester on the Gulf Coast who organized a group called Defensive Action. The group advanced the position that the murder of a Pensacola abortion provider by clinic protester Michael Griffin had been "justifiable homicide." McCullough scored Hill an appearance on the Phil Donahue's national daytime television show to explain his novel and shocking views. McCullough published an article in the May 1993 issue of Life Advocate magazine titled "Griffin Is a Hero!" Hill went on in 1994 to murder a doctor and an escort and to seriously wound another escort and was executed by the state of Horida in 2003 for his crimes.

McCullough was a founder of an Operation Rescue spinoff group called Missionaries to the Pre-born, and headed a Missionaries project called Prisoners of Christ. This was a fundraising support group for captured clinic bombers and arsonists, as well as convicted murderers Michael Griffin and Paul Hill. For years, McCullough maintained the fund via his Washington, D.C., public-relations firm, the Christian Communications Network. He maintained a Prisoners of Christ link on the company's Web site. McCullough has since handed off his Prisoners of Christ function to the Army of God, a society of proponents and veterans of antiabortion violence. He continues to operate the Christian Communications Network and several related public-relations services, including the Catholic Newswire, Christian Newswire and Standard Newswire. Despite his past public-relations and fundraising work for domestic terrorists, to which work the mainstream media turn a blind eye, McCullough now boasts as clients a virtual Who's Who of leading organizations of the religious right. These include Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, and Priests for Life. More surprisingly, they also include Democrats for Life, Faithful Democrats, the Catholic University of America and even the White House, which recently used McCullough's services on the occasion of the death of Jerry Falwell.

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Pavone seemed an unlikely choice as spiritual adviser to the Schindlers because he lived in Texas and New York. But his most important role was as political director in a high-stakes political and media circus, and for this job he came well-equipped. As national director of Priests for Life since 1993, he had become one of the top antiabortion activists in the world. He is president of the National Pro-Life Religious Council, which is a coalition of mostly dissident mainline-Protestant factions that was founded in 1987 as an affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee, and he sits on the board of a group that tours the country exhibiting huge posters of gory fetuses. For two years in the late 1990s, he sat on the Pontifical Council on the Family, serving as a Vatican point man for antiabortion activism around the world. While in Rome, he was informally referred to as Pope John Paul II's "vicar for life."

Once back in New York in 2000, Pavone apparently assumed Scheidler's role, serving as de facto director of political activism and as diplomat to antiabortion factions, including the violence-prone ones. The Village Voice reported, "Pavone's explanation of his relationships with these activists seems murky. On the one hand, he insists none of his allies are violent. 'If anyone ever said that shootings, bombings, arsons, or any other kinds of things we would call violence were justified, we'd come out as strongly and say we disagree with that,' the priest says. However, when asked about his prochoice critics, Pavone says, 'They see in us a linkage between the extreme and mainstream. There is a truth there that they're picking up on. We have always been a networking hub. The doors are open to everyone.'"

Unlike Scheidler, the young Pavone was more about high-level politics in the hierarchy and the White House and Congress than street action. Since the Schiavo debacle, Pavone has been working to establish a new order of antiabortion-activist priests and laymen, the Missionaries of the Gospel of Life, in Amarillo. His future is cloudy. The Missionaries of the Gospel of Life has the blessing of the Vatican, but it has not yet attracted much interest. The order plans to train members not only in direct-action tactics against clinics but also in the mechanics of electoral politics and legislative lobbying. Meanwhile, Priests for Life is the subject of an Internal Revenue Service complaint filed by Catholics for a Free Choice, which accuses the group of electioneering in violation of its federal tax-exemption.

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The militant zeal of the Schiavo trio became infectious at an intemperate but decisive moment in American history and in the public discussion of end-of-life issues. Although the media opted not to tell us much about these advisers to and spokesmen for the Schindlers, Americans nevertheless got a chance to see what the world looked like to leading religious-right activists--and they did not like what they saw.

Danforth got it right. Whatever one believes about when life begins or ends, the spectacle of the government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world attempting to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo made people realize: "This could happen to me." They did not want histrionic, egotistical religious-right activists holding demonstrations and vigils at their homes and hospices, hurling scurrilous accusations such as those leveled at Terri's husband Michael Schiavo, or turning a family's private, painful decisions into global tabloid fodder. They demonstrated at the polls that they did not want the federal government unnecessarily intruding in their private lives: The participation of the president and congressional leaders in this unseemly spectacle is widely agreed to have been one of the factors that turned voters against the Republican Party in the 2006 elections, giving the Democrats control of both houses for the first time since 1994.

The congressional intervention, of which then-House majority leader Tom DeLay, R-Tex., was a principal actor, brought to the surface a story of how DeLay had acted when faced with an end-of-life issue of his own. Two decades earlier, DeLay and his family chose not to prolong artificially the life of his comatose father, who had been severely injured in a freak accident. As tempting as it is to dismiss DeLay as a hypocrite, there is more to it than that.

Those in favor of prolonging Schiavo's life told a simplistic narrative in which outsiders came to the rescue of a helpless young woman about to die at the hands of people with bad motives. The DeLayled intervention, however, generated a separate narrative that quite overpowered that rescue narrative. This other narrative reminded us what it means for a vastly powerful and overreaching central government arbitrarily to interfere in the most intimate aspects of personal and family life. This narrative of the relationship between individuals and government is central to our individual and national identity and embraced by a wide political spectrum. There is a disconnect between the moral-authoritarian impulses of many on the religious right and the civil-libertarian sensibilities of Americans steeped in generations of constitutional democracy. We see the disconnect in the many stories of people who oppose abortion but also have abortions. We see it in the case of Tom DeLay.

This was evident in polls that showed how badly DeLay et al. miscalculated in seeking to pander to what Senator Mel Martinez called "the pro-life base." A CBS News poll found that 82 percent of Americans thought Congress should not have intervened in the Schiavo case, and 75 percent said government should keep out of end-of-life issues generally.

The Schiavo episode was a tremendous setback for the religious right, and for all those whose strident demands for the Florida and federal legislatures and executives to intervene in a decision that was best left to those who were best able to decide: Terri's husband, who knew her wishes; the doctors who made the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state, which has stood the test of time after multiple medical examinations and autopsy results; and the local court, which could sort out the legal issues.

The Schiavo episode revealed the real agenda of DeLay and the leaders of the religious right. For all their hysteria about the state and federal judiciary behaving as tyrants and as activists with a political agenda, DeLay's highest-profile piece of legislation sought to make the judiciary an agent of the religious right's political agenda. Although this aspect may not have filtered out to the wider electorate, congressional abuse of the legislative process to engage in demagoguery with respect to Schiavo was easy enough for everyone to understand. Average citizens were as repulsed as John Danforth. The lessons of the Schiavo case are likely to stay with public officials at all levels for a long time to come.

FREDERICK CLARKSON has written about the religious right for 25 years. He is the author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy and is a co-founder of the group blog Talk2Action.