Taranto: They Ain't Married

Yes, I know, I'm beating a dead horse. I suppose we'll soon have another corpse to beat.

Still:

According to news reports, Mr. Schiavo lives with a woman named Jodi Centonze, and they have two children together. Surely any court would consider this prima facie evidence of adultery. And this is no mere fling; a sympathetic 2003 profile in the Orlando Sentinel described Centonze as Mr. Schiavo's "fiancée." Mr. Schiavo, in other words, has virtually remarried. Short of outright bigamy, his relationship with Centonze is as thoroughgoing a violation of his marriage vows as it is possible to imagine.

The point here is not to castigate Mr. Schiavo for behaving badly. It would require a heroic degree of self-sacrifice for a man to forgo love and sex in order to remain faithful to an incapacitated wife, and it would be unreasonable to hold an ordinary man to a heroic standard.

But it is equally unreasonable to let Mr. Schiavo have it both ways. If he wishes to assert his marital authority to do his wife in, the least society can expect in return is that he refrain from making a mockery of his marital obligations. The grimmest irony in this tragic case is that those who want Terri Schiavo dead are resting their argument on the fiction that her marriage is still alive.

Politics Makes Whores of Us All Update: If the Republicans have been less than heroic on this issue, at least they have good reasons -- of the cynical sort -- for their cowardice.

The public wants the tube yanked, to the extent they care at all, which they largely do not.

I suppose Republicans deserve some small amount of praise for the late-in-the-game half-measures they've taken. Politicians are whores, and will always be so, and few have hearts of gold. Still, the whores at least tried, tenatively and half-heartedly, to do the right thing.

Which is reason for light praise as far as whores go, I reckon.

Thanks to KCTrio for the bad polling news.

posted by Ace at 03:29 PM

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