Civility Watch
Rick Santorum and his wife went through the tragedy of a stillborn baby. Normally, pundits on the Left would be silent or respectful. Don Surber points this out.
JACQUELINE Kennedy suffered the three worst outcomes of a pregnancy.
She suffered a miscarriage in 1955. Her daughter, Arabella, was stillborn in 1956. And in 1963, her son, Patrick, died two days after his birth.
I don’t remember a newspaper columnist or television commentator making light of her personal tragedies.
That was then, this is now.
Nearly 50 years after the death of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, some liberal commentators made political use of the death of Gabriel Santorum, who died within two hours of his birth.
As his mother, Karen, wrote in 1998 in her book, “Letters to Gabriel,” she and her husband brought him home before his burial. She had to explain to two young children the death of the baby brother they had expected.
His father is a Republican who now is running for president.
After Rick Santorum won the Iowa primary, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Alan Colmes of Fox News decided to make fun of how the Santorums handled this death.
“He’s not a little weird, it’s that he’s really weird,” Robinson said of Santorum.
“And some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird, um, that I think that some Republicans are gonna be off-put.
“Um, not everybody is going to, going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the, the, the stillborn ah, ah, child, ah, um, whose body they took home to, to kind of sleep with it, introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.”
Peter Wehner, writing at Commentary, finds this rather unwierd.
On these comments I have three observations to make, the first of which is that spending time with a stillborn child (or one who died shortly after birth, as in the Santorum case) is commonly recommended. The matter of taking the child home for a few hours is less common, but they did it so that their other children could also spend a little time with the deceased child, and that is definitely recommended.
Wehner cites recommendations from the American Pregnancy Association. Going back to Don Surber, he notes one particular circumstance why taking the stillborn child home to the family might not be done.
Charles Lane, editorial writer for the Washington Post, responded to the Santorum controversy by recalling his family’s loss of a son whose heart stopped two hours before birth.
“I regret that, unlike the Santorums, who presented the body of their child to their children, we did not show Jonathan’s body to our other son, who was six years old at the time,” Lane wrote.
“When I told him what had happened, his first question was, “Well, where is the baby?”
“I tried to explain what a morgue is, and why the baby went there. It was awkward and unsatisfactory — too abstract.
“In hindsight, I was not protecting my son from a difficult conversation, I was protecting myself.”
Perfectly understandable, but to go ahead and do it is most certainly not "weird".
So what’s the difference between then and now? Back to Wehner:
The second point is the casual cruelty of Robinson and those like him. Robinson seems completely comfortable lampooning a man and his wife who had experienced the worst possible nightmare for parents: the death of their child. It is one thing to say you would act differently if you were in the situation faced by Rick and Karen Santorum?; it’s quite another to deride them as “crazy” and “very weird,” which is what commentators on the left are increasingly doing, and with particular delight and glee.
We are seeing how ideology and partisan politics can so disfigure people’s minds and hearts that they become vicious in their assaults on those with whom they have political disagreements. I would hope no one I know would, in a thousand years, ridicule parents who were grappling with unfathomable human pain. Even if those parents were liberal. Even if they were running for president and first lady.
The third point is it tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the times.
Some of this may be attributable to "the times" in general, to be sure. But I would like to note the blatant hypocrisy of liberals who claim to care more than their conservative brethren. This from the ideology that, as Wehner so aptly puts it, "champion[s] abortion, even partial-birth abortion". That is a culture of death, one that does not value life or give it the proper reverence, especially for the least of these.
I always find the term "Christian Liberal" as something of an oxymoron. I understand why Christians might be drawn to some of the Left’s rhetoric and positions, but this sort of behavior belies much of what goes on beneath, and it’s not something I could bear to support. I can still love my fellow man, give to good charities, and care for the poor without having to support a political party where this sort of attitude is barely beneath the surface.
Filed under: Abortion • Culture • Democrats • Doug • Liberal • Politics
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