I may finally agree with Jesse Jackson

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Jesse Speaks about Schiavo

Jesse Jackson Urges Fla. Woman Be Kept Alive

Mar 29, 1:37 PM (ET)

A protester prays facing the Woodside Hospice at sunrise, where brain damaged woman Terri Schiavo...

By Jane Sutton

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. (Reuters) - The Rev. Jesse Jackson pleaded on Tuesday for Terri Schiavo to be kept alive as the brain-damaged Florida woman at the center of a bitter family and political dispute slipped toward death.

"She is being starved to death, she is being dehydrated to death. That's immoral and unnecessary," the civil rights leader told reporters after meeting Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, near the hospice where she is being cared for.

Schiavo's feeding tube was removed on March 18 after a protracted court battle between Schiavo's husband, who is her legal guardian, and the Schindlers that galvanized many U.S. religious conservatives.

The case prompted the Republican-led U.S. Congress to pass a special law pushing the case into the federal courts, and President Bush cut short a vacation to sign it.

Bush's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has also intervened in the case.

But recent polls have shown most Americans felt Congress should have stayed out of Schiavo's case, and that the government should stay out of families' life and death decisions. A CBS poll last week found that 82 percent of Americans felt Congress should have stayed out of the case.