I APPRECIATE Andrew Sullivan’s quoting me, but he’s wrong: Unlike Andrew, I don’t think that America is in danger of being taken over by religious Zealots, constituting an American Taliban and bent on establishing theocracy. I think that — despite their occasionally abusive emails (and most aren’t abusive, just upset) — the people that Mickey Kaus is calling “pro-tubists” are well-meaning, sincere, and possessed of an earnest desire to do good. I don’t think that they’re nascent Mullah Omars, and I think that calling them that just makes the problem worse. This is a tragedy, and it’s become a circus. Name-calling just makes you one of the clowns.

But I do think that process, and the Constitution, matter. Trampling the Constitution 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. But respecting their 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. As I say, I thought conservatives knew this.

UPDATE: I very strongly recommend this post by Donald Sensing, who doesn’t sound like one of the American Taliban to me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More evidence of why this process stuff matters:

MIAMI – Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo wasn’t to be removed from her hospice, a team of Florida law enforcement agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted – but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge’s order, The Miami Herald has learned. . . .

For a brief period, local police, who have officers around the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called a showdown.

In the end, the state agents and the Department of Children and Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.

It’s good that things didn’t escalate as they might have. Shooting matches between different law-enforcement agencies are real banana-republic stuff, and that’s what you get when you ignore the rules.