Dennis Jones will not soon forget it. How could he?
The Legislature's phone system was down for three days. The fax machines wouldn't work.
Such was the power last October of Christian conservatives, who lobbied to ram through the bill that let Gov. Jeb Bush order the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. The phone calls, faxes and e-mails so overloaded the Legislature that the communications system broke down.
They were victorious last year, but conservatives probably won't get a chance to do more damage this year.
Jones, from Treasure Island, and the senate majority leader, won't allow it. He'll be carrying out the orders of his boss, Jacksonville's Jim King, who is senate president.
King wrote Florida's law on death and dying. The law permits the denial of nutrition to those who are terminally ill or in a persistent vegetative state, like Schiavo. King isn't about to see it undone.
Yet he voted to make an exception for Schiavo. So did Jones. Both men are unhappy with what they did.
I feel only so sorry for them. I don't know what difference it would have made to the outcome, but leaders aren't leaders when they bend in the wind.
As senate president, King was under the toughest pressure.
Like Jones and the phone system, there was a part of the campaign King won't easily forget: the threats. Yes, people who say they're on the side of life wanted King harmed.
Those who threatened him claimed the high ground of Christianity. But their words seemed "anything but out of the mouth of Christians," he told me this week.
King said he received "very, very angry threats, veiled and not veiled."
"Nobody has said, "I'm going to shoot you,"' he said. It was more on the order of wishing what happened to Terri Schiavo - her condition followed a heart attack - would happen to him.
It took King a while to realize that he had been fooled. Most of the callers, e-mailers and fax senders weren't from Florida. They were part of a well organized national campaign from the far right.
But most of the callers who contacted King after the vote last fall were Floridians, and they were infuriated at the adoption of what's called Terri's Law.
That is in line with a poll the Times and the Miami Herald took in December that showed two-thirds of us were against what the Legislature and the governor did.
Look at what happened here: A campaign that was partially driven by forces out of state managed to overrun the wishes of most of us.
Talk about dysfunctional democracy."
In the latest of the mind-numbing number of court proceedings over the past decade, Michael Schiavo is challenging Terri's law. Gov. Bush is battling back.
Bush is also at odds with his own constituency, the voters of Florida, who don't want the government involved in one of the most difficult acts they'll face in their lives: deciding how to care for their dying relatives.
King and Jones have had to face those decisions.
King wrote the law on death and dying after dealing with his parents' deaths.
Jones' 89-year-old mother died two weeks ago, on Feb. 6, after he and his brother decided to remove her feeding tube.
King predicted that after my column today, he'll get more threats, more calls from people who consider him "the devil incarnate."
I'll get them too. The phone will ring off the hook. The column will be posted on Web sites, and my e-mail in-basket will spill over.
That's the way it is when the topic is Terri Schiavo. Writing about it is like sticking your finger into a beehive. Conservatives who call themselves Christians will swarm, denouncing me and anybody else who dares to disagree with them.
These are not people who are capable of admitting defeat, although they have had nothing but defeat in the courts.
