No, I didn’t hear those words shouted out at the police barricades in front of a hospice in Florida. This is where Michael Schiavo is trying to end the life of his brain-damaged wife, Terri, by starving her to death.

They were uttered in a Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights by President John F. Kennedy at the White House on June 11, 1963.

Nobody that night could have dreamed of a time when a US judge would order the disconnection of a feeding tube from a helpless woman despite the pleas of her loving parents.

Michael, now that you have a new, though common-law wife and kids, divorce Terri, but don’t kill her!

Judge James Whittmore, you could have ruled that Terri be sent home with her parents. Mr. & Mrs. Schindler could have learned how to operate the feeding tube – but instead of making life the issue you allowed the case to be about freedom of choice.

What’s the big deal here? One of the liberal placards in the crowd on Wednesday said: "right to life and right to death" Here’s the problem: Terri left no will. We have only her husband’s word that she one time expressed a wish not to be kept alive.

The doctrine of freedom of choice is accelerating towards its ultimate ruthless conclusion. Even as now we have the freedom to terminate the life of babies we don't feel we want, so there are those who want to live in a world where the unproductive and infirm can be terminated by choice.

House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) said, "When a person's intentions regarding whether to receive lifesaving treatment are unclear, the responsibility of a compassionate nation is to affirm that person's right to life." Why can't our secular humanism riddled courts see that?

Today the case is before the US Supreme Court. Desperate that Terri’s life should end and smugly sure that its in her best interests the voices from the extreme left are yelling that the Federal government should stay out of this case.

I ask you rather to consider the 14th amendment of the US constitution. It ensures that every citizen shall have the right of due process in matters of life and death. Surely Terri has this right.

There’s no ventilator helping Terri to breathe. She isn’t on a heart or kidney machine. She’s brain damaged but not brain dead. Do you understand the acute difference?

If today’s brain damaged can be snuffed out, and even that would be better than lingering starvation and wrenching thirst, don’t kid yourself that the next step can’t be termination of the profoundly aged or the mentally deficient. Do not allow the European trend of redefining the value of the individual life to rob our country of its Christian heritage.

Speak up now – or face the disappointed look in your grandchildren’s eyes. They’ll wonder why the moral soul of the nation was corrupted during your watch.

The Bible warns of dire consequences for the one who "hounds to death the needy and the brokenhearted." Short term judicial expediency may let Terri die, but God’s sentence on a society that permits the defenseless to be murdered will come about. You might even live to see it.

The secret socialists among us are bent on pretending that what’s good for society as a whole must also be good for individuals within it. The grand failure of world socialism has not educated them to Kennedy’s sobering warning: "the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened