When Is Adultery Not Adultery?

I am not sure if it is his appearance or his message that sometimes irritates me more but in many ways I agree with Shmuley Boteach on the Schiavo dilemma. I don't care if Mrs. Schiavo is a vegetable or lost at sea, Mr. Schiavo is still married and living and breeding children with his common law wife just bugs me. I am far from being an evangelical, a devout Catholic or in any way close to agreeing with the religious right on anything. But I just don't see why this man is so bound and determined to stay married to a woman when he has obviously moved on. Mind you, I wouldn't have had a problem if he, who was still young at the time of Terri's collapse, had just told her parents: "I need to divorce your daughter and start a new life." No one would have blamed him. They were obviously willing to take care of their daughter. But somehow, parties on both sides seem to have dropped into a permanent impasse and power struggle. I don't even think it is about Terri as much as it is about both sides wanting to be right and win.

Also, I question how harshly a woman - if her husband were in the same condition - would be viewed if she'd taken up house with and had children by another man. I suspect she'd be labeled, among other scurrilous things, a scarlet woman and the courts would probably not have a problem granting custody to his parents since his wife and presumed caretaker had moved on with another life. And yes, I think had Christopher Reeve's wife decided to bail on him, there would be public outcry to the high heavens.

Good thing for all of us that Christopher Reeve was not married to someone like Michael Schiavo. His wife Terri made a casual comment to him, or so he claims, that should she ever be reduced to a severely disabled state, she would want to die. Schiavo has certainly devoted himself to fulfilling her request.

Unlike the Reeves, in this particular exchange between wife and husband there was apparently never an attempt to encourage Terri to embrace life. Michael Schiavo could easily have said, "Honey, however you are, I will always love you. So get such silly ideas out of your head." Instead, he promised his wife that, should she become mentally incapacitated, he would move heaven and earth to have her die. And they say that there are no good husbands left in America.

I recognize that there is a difference between physical paralysis and mental incapacity, and that in this sense the Reeve and Schiavo stories differ. But the central similarity is that both involve one spouse revealing to the other the wish to die if he or she became mentally or physically incapacitated. In the Reeve case, a wife sees it as her obligation to inspire her husband to choose life. In the Schiavo case, the husband makes not even a limited effort to dissuade his wife from her death wish, although she is speaking with him as a young person in her early twenties.

Moreover, are physical paralysis and mental incapacity really that different? To a man like Christopher Reeve, who led an extremely active life, being confined to a wheelchair was the worst thing that could happen. And yet his wife told him he had not changed, that there was something inside him that could never be broken. His quintessence had not been affected by the fall.

The same is true for the mentally handicapped. Doesn't a parent love his child even if the child is born with the most severe mental infirmity? Can't a man remain devoted to his wife if she loses her mental faculties? We see this kind of devotion in spouses of Alzheimer's patients all the time. Clearly, Michael Schiavo does not share this perspective. Whatever he once saw in his wife was lost as soon as she suffered severe brain damage.

America has never quite witnessed a husband like Michael Schiavo - a man who is prepared to take on the might of the United States government to ensure that his wife ends up six feet under. And who could fault him? After all, a promise is a promise unless, of course, it's a promise of fidelity in marriage.