This is from the Wall St. Journal’s Best of the Web Today e-mail, offering some clear thinking about one of the uglier aspects of the Terri Schiavo case, and one in which those who argue to save her may be accused of merely being judgmental or lacking compassion*:

But why do those of us who aren’t right-to-life absolutists side with Mrs. Schiavo’s parents, who want to keep her alive, over her husband, who wants her dead? It’s a fair question, and it raises another one: What kind of husband is Michael Schiavo?

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.

*It’s kind of ridiculous to have to hear that you lack compassion because you want someone alive and not dead, but this case has gone on long enough to get divided into the usual camps. And liberals love to accuse conservatives of this so much that they just can’t help themselves. So in this case, liberal news outlets are full of cries against our hypocrisy and inconsistency, and conservative outlets are saying the same thing about them. At this point in the dialogue, no additional light is shed and nothing is accomplished, but everybody gets to blow off steam.