Overreacting?

I keep hoping, wishing, praying that I'm overreaction to the whole Terri Schiavo case. Surely our democracy isn't really in jeopardy over this case! But then I read comments like this:

And if the whole system collapses..well, toooooo bad. In this case, I believe it better to have the devil we don't know, than the devil we do---because the one we DO leads to death.

This scares the bejeezus out of me. I'm not the only one, check out the Moderate Voice:

We may have thought things were bad before she died.

Now, the gloves are going to come off.

We may destroy our republic over the fate of one woman, after sacrificing tens of thousands over more than two centuries.

Even I'm not willing to go that far. Yet. For a similar reaction, go checkout the article by the most popular Republican, pro-Bush blogger on the internet, Glenn Reynolds:

Trampling traditional limits on governmental power in an earnest desire to do good in high-profile cases has been a hallmark of a certain sort of liberalism, and it's the sort of thing that I thought conservatives eschewed. If I were in charge of making the decision, I might well put the tube back and turn Terri Schiavo over to her family. But I'm not, and the Florida courts are, and they seem to have done a conscientious job. Maybe they came to the right decision, and maybe they didn't; this is a hard case. But respecting the courts' role in the system, and not rushing to overturn all the rules because we don't like the outcome, seems to me to be part of being a member of civilized society rather than a mob. I thought conservatives knew this. Before things are over, they may wish they hadn't forgotten.

As pointed out, Tom Harkin, Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson all supported this legislation and more direct federal involvement. Perhaps we finally found an issue where it's moderates versus the extremists, with the far right and far left teaming up against all of us in the middle. Or perhaps, this has nothing to do with those old, discardable terms 'right', 'left', 'liberal' or 'conservative', just those of us still fighting for good government against those who can't see the forest for the trees.

I've been writing about this one issue far too much lately. Time to move on. Hopefully, the rest of the country will as well. I fear the results if it does not.