Ever wonder how low a man can go? Here is the answer to that question.

State Senate candidate Randall Terry earned $10,000 last year for roughly two months of work as the spokesman for Terri Schiavo's family, according to a financial-disclosure form filed with the state Division of Elections.

Terry, the anti-abortion activist who is trying to unseat veteran legislator Jim King of Jacksonville in the Sept. 5 Republican primary, defends the payments, saying he was worth every penny as he tried to keep the brain-damaged woman alive. He was paid by the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, a St. Petersburg-based nonprofit set up by Schiavo's parents and siblings.

"My services were worth the investment," Terry said, adding that he also helped plan the family's media strategy. "I would have done it for free in a heartbeat."

In 2003, when Schiavo's feeding tube was first removed and then reinserted after the Florida Legislature passed "Terri's Law," Terry says he was an unpaid adviser.

The family offered to pay him last year, and he accepted because he was a college student and needed the money, he said.

Terry's financial-disclosure form shows that his only other source of income in 2005 was $4,545 that he was paid as president of the Society for Truth and Justice, a St. Augustine-based advocacy group. This year he was awarded a bachelor's degree in communications from the State University of New York's Empire State College, he said.

To benefit financially from the horrible circus that surrounded this poor woman's final days on earth is just about the most evil thing that I can imagine. There was so much anger and pain that both sides of Terry Schiavo's family went through during this debacle that it seems subhuman that somebody accepted money for speaking to the media on behalf of the Shiavo family.

I am sure that there were many people who would have helped this family without asking for, or accepting, any payement. And now this human serpent is using the blood money to try and get himself elected to the Senate. Randall Terry is s truly hideous example of a human being.

I cetainly hope that the voters in Florida recognize him for what he is and send him packing. Then maybe he will have to find another grieving family to leech off of.