I have been having a terrible time understanding what drives the right to their rare and often clumsily expressed feelings of compassion and empathy.
From what I am able to tell, right-wing empathy seems to only be evoked in cases where human "blobs" are involved - zygotes, fetuses, persons in vegetative states etc. What empathy and compassion they have clearly stops well short of ordinary, everyday human beings.
What is it about the psychology of the right that rouses them to such fierce and righteous indignation over the perceived rights of blobs? I have a theory. Read on...
I considered at first that they might simply reserve compassion for people like themselves - white Christians. How then to explain the general indifference to the fate of someone like Karla Faye Tucker, for example, or to the improverishment of so many white Christians by Republican policies? No, the white Christian theory wasn't correct.
Then I thought perhaps it might be reserved for those considered "saintly" or "pure" - but really, someone like Rachel Corrie was by all accounts far more saintly than Terri Shiavo and the right can't stop defecating on her. No, I had to dig deeper.
Finally I came to realize that since the capacity of those on the right to experience ordinary human empathy is so extraordinarily under-developed, they can only ever experience compassion for the most cartoonishly cute and helpless creatures. These creatures must be either non or at least semi-human because the right has such boundless contempt for actual human beings.
When they do finally experience this strange (to them) emotion, it terrifies and awes them to such a degree that they immediately freight it with religious significance and decide God must be speaking to them.
That's my best guess, anyway. Perhaps we can use this chink in the psychological armor of the right. Perhaps we should frame all of our issues in such a way as to evoke the damaging effects of Republican policies on quasi-humans: for example the effects of mercury dumping on zygotes.
Something to consider when dealing with the empathy-impaired.