Wed Mar 30/05
Steyn on Schiavo, unfortunately 

What do Licia Corbella and Mark Steyn have in common? They both incorrectly referred to Michael Schiavo's relationship with his longtime girlfriend as a common-law marriage. Corbella's cock-up was read by a maximum of 66,000 people plus her Internet following, of whom perhaps five in total would care, but I'm afraid Steyn's Sunday Sun-Times column will have propagated this fallacy much farther afield, among reasonably intelligent people like myself who do find it upsetting when leading columnists don't check their facts.

Here is the (rather conclusive) offending sentence (my emphasis): "Michael Schiavo is living in a common-law relationship with another woman, by whom he has fathered children." Again, no he isn't. That renders this entire paragraph, especially the bolded material, embarrassingly moot:

Michael Schiavo took a vow to be faithful in sickness and in health, forsaking all others till death do them part. He's forsaken his wife and been unfaithful to her: She is, de facto, his ex-wife, yet, de jure, he appears to have the right to order her execution. This is preposterous. Suppose his current common-law partner were to fall victim to a disabling accident. Would he also be able to have her terminated? Can he exercise his spousal rights polygamously?

Man, that was tough to read. Maybe I'm making too much of this, but I admire Mark Steyn's writing a great deal, and his is a brand of punditry that depends on an iron-clad grasp of history, of current events — of his facts, however liberally he sometimes chooses to use them. To see him mess up like that is both very disappointing and very indicative of the hideously partisan mindfuck that is this Schiavo debacle.

Indeed, Steyn's whole column seemed tentative by his standards. You don't often see him saying something like this: "I'm neither a Floridian nor a lawyer, and, for all I know, it may be legal under Florida law for the state to order her to be starved to death." It's just weak, for lack of a better word, and it only gets weaker when, having cast himself as a clueless foreign non-jurist, he accuses various panels of Floridian judges of dropping the ball:

Any legal system with a decent respect for the status quo — something too many American judges are increasingly disdainful of — would recognize that her present life, in all its limitations, is now a well-established fact, and it is the most grotesque judicial overreaching for any court at this late stage to decide enough is enough.

I see overreaching here, no question, but it's not a judge's. To me, Steyn's column reads like he felt obliged to write about it, and in the final analysis it looks like he should have trusted his trepidations.