Joyce and I disagree about Terry Schiavo.

She’s a friend of mine who once watched a friend die in circumstances painfully similar to Schiavo’s. His name was Jackie Wilson and he was a singer. Indeed, he was one of the immortals.

Wilson suffered a heart attack onstage in 1975. He fell and struck his head, sustaining brain damage. It took nine years for him to die, during which he was reportedly comatose and vegetative. But Joyce, who was there, has always disputed that characterization vehemently. She says Wilson was awake and aware and might have recovered, but for malevolent caretakers and indifferent care.

So she takes the Schiavo case personally, is appalled by doctors who say the 41-year-old woman is in a chronic vegetative state from which she will never recover and by judges who say that her husband, Michael, has the right to remove her feeding tube and allow her to die, as, he says, she would have wanted.

I support the judges’ reasoning. But, as Joyce sees it, “There’s a right Terri Schiavo has that transcends whether Michael Schiavo should be the decision maker. And that right is to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the benefit of the doubt as to treatment as an American citizen who is handicapped.”

As I said, we disagree, but I felt morally obligated to hear her out, if only to be reminded that most of those who differ with me about Schiavo nevertheless act from righteous intentions and earnest convictions. That’s one of the things that makes this a hard call: there are no villains.

Unless, of course, you count the politicians.

I refer you to an anonymous memo that reportedly circulated recently among the GOP faithful. “This is a great political issue,” it said.

You should know that 20 courts in seven years have heard this case. They have repeatedly affirmed, reaffirmed and re-reaffirmed a spouse’s right to make end-of-life decisions for an incapacitated partner.

Yet each time they do, here come GOP lawmakers — Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist prominent among them — scheming to subvert the judiciary. In 2003, there was legislation empowering the governor to override Michael Schiavo’s wishes and order the feeding tube re-inserted. More recently, there was an attempt to prolong Terri’s life by subpoenaing her before Congress. And passage of Frist’s bill allowing her parents to challenge in federal court that which has already been exhaustively litigated at the state level. And talk of taking her into “protective custody.” And so on.

At this point, I would not be surprised to see Gov. Jeb and Sen. Bill lead a commando team in kidnapping Schiavo from the hospice. What else is left?

And while all this must play like gangbusters to the pro-life conservatives who are its intended audience, I hope somebody takes note of the ABC News poll that says 70 percent of us oppose this blunderbuss intrusion of government into the most painful and personal of decisions. Small wonder. Hypocrisy has seldom seemed so ripe.

How do you square this interference in a husband’s attempt to honor his wife’s wishes with all that bloviating about the sanctity of marriage? How do you reconcile it with the conservative mantra that government must be kept from intruding into our lives?

I respect Joyce’s pain and that of Terri Schiavo’s parents. If you are a human being, how can you not? But it is possible to respect the pain and yet respectfully disagree — possible to respect it and yet hate the rank opportunism that exploits it, that turns a dying woman into a prop and a family’s nightmare into a photo op.

“This is a great political issue?!”

No. It is a tragedy. One family’s personal, private tragedy.

Too bad some of us can’t tell the difference.

— Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald.