Speaking of the Schiavo case, Cathy Young has a post up at Reason’s Hit & Run blog on the absolutely astounding number of falsehoods coming out of the keep-her-alive crowd:

I’m very angry right now, at the hysteria and the lies, at the collective insanity unfolding on the news. There are people claiming, and barely being challenged by interviewers, that Terri Schiavo is still trying to talk, smiling, and lifting her arms to “dance” in response to music. (If she were conscious and being slowly killed by hunger and thirst, would that be a likely response?) There’s the preposterous story by the lawyer who claimed that she elicited the beginning of an “I want to live” from Terri — which, of course, conveniently happened with no witnesses and no tape recorder, and which this lawyer waited to report for a week after the removal of Terri’s feeding tube. For most of the people who are championing this cause, this is not about protecting Terri Schiavo’s rights. I heard one of the protesters say on the news, “It’s not what Terri would have wanted, it’s what God wants.” I don’t think the religious right is our own homegrown Taliban, but maybe it’s about as close to a Taliban as you can have in modern American society. These are people who really do want the state to enforce their vision of “what God wants.” In the name of this cause, apparently, it’s more than okay to forget that little Ten Commandments thing about bearing false witness.

Neither side has a monopoly (or even a healthy market share) of virtue in this case, but some pretty inane things are coming from those sympathetic to the parents. It’s fine to think the tube should stay in and to believe that it’s never OK to let life end when it can be prolonged, but simply disregarding all scientific evidence and making odd, even magical, claims does nothing to bolster that case.