It could have been worse:

And Ashcroft's obsessions: these too were a puzzle.... [When he was governor,] Missouri state troopers were deployed to prevent Pete Busalacchi from ending the life of his comatose daughter, who had no hope for recovery. "It was a matter of one person in a high position inflicting his religious beliefs onto a family," Busalacchi said. "Is John Ashcroft's religion better than mine?"

(Source, Vanity Fair, February 2004, via Teresa Nielsen Hayden.)

More, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Busalacchi's daughter was pulled from a wrecked and burning car on her father's birthday, May 29, 1987. She was 17. In a desperate attempt to keep her alive, doctors removed a large part of her brain. Her father, a widower, authorized the insertion of a feeding tube. "I wanted her to get better. A year later, I might have had different thoughts," said Busalacchi.

He still resents the intrusion of John Ashcroft, then governor of Missouri, who intervened to prevent the removal of his daughter's feeding tube.

Busalacchi recalled that he had "20 or 30 doctors look at her" before he decided what to do.

"I was with her, I clipped her fingernails, I talked to her," he said. "Once I turned on music real loud and danced around her bedside and believe me, if anything could have, that would have evoked laughter. I tried to tell funny stories. I got no reaction."

Busalacchi said he is surrounded in his home by pictures of his daughter, and he remembers her every day. "I'm not as strongly angry as I was," he said. "But I'd love to talk to John Ashcroft some day. He just injected his own religious beliefs in my daughter's case."

Remember: The goal of the religious conservatives is a judiciary made up entirely of Ashcrofts, fifty Ashcrofts as governors, Ashcroft clones controlling all fifty state legislatures and an Ashcroft clone as president. They'll never be satisfied with anything less.