Did Goebbels have fact-checkers?

Today's nonsense — about legalized polygamy (or quasi-legal quasi-polygamy) in the Netherlands — has been going around since last fall. And it has been repeatedly debunked for just as long.

The story's latest reincarnation — Harem, Scare 'Em:
Worrying About Polygamy — in Opinion Journal is especially stupid.

In September, Holland registered its first civil union among three partners…. Some conservatives, like the Weekly Standard's Stanley Kurtz, decry these developments as another step down the road to gay marriage, since one redefintion of marriage may lead to another. Perhaps so. They are indisputably another step down the road to polygamy. [emph added]

Either the column's author, Naomi Schaeffer Riley, did not actually read Kurtz's column or she didn't understand it. And of course she didn't bother to provide a link to it.

If Riley had actually read and understood Kurtz's column, she would have discovered something very interesting: no civil union was ever registered.

But hey, Naomi's just the deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's Taste page. It's not as if she's a professional or anything.