It is disturbing, if not at all surprising, that its okay in the mainstream media to call really "weird" Rick Santorum (and his wife) for taking home from the hospital their baby who was supposed to die within a couple of hours after birth. As others have pointed out, it might strike an alien as "weird" that families "wake" the dead and have a corpse laid out in a coffin for a day or two in one's own home before burying the departed. How strange is that? Such a thing is increasingly strange to a society that no longer has a coherent way of dealing with life and death--some say you have the right to kill yourself, or kill a very sick relative, or kill your baby as long as the baby is still inside the womb, or to kill a baby after birth if he is in some sense deformed, or to kill a baby within a certain window after birth if the parents decide not to "keep it," to dispose of a body after death by incineration without having a "wake" with the body beforehand, to dispose of a body after death by chopping it up for various scientific purposes (with or without wake), to dispose of the mortal remains by cremation and scattering the ashes, to save the ashes in an urn, kept at home, to "inter" the urn in a mausoleum, or grave, or to bury the body in a grave, crypt, and so on. Just what view of human life, of infants who die soon after birth, of death and proper burial and customs, is operative for those who call what the Santorums did to say goodbye to their dead child "weird"? What would you have done, and please tell us, exactly, why? Do you have any principles on this topic that you'd care to share? Or is okay that different people have different customs and rituals? But some are okay to mock? Can we scrutinize your
And why isn't it considered disturbing that one would oppose care to an infant born alive from an abortion? On surviving of abortion, hear the story of Gianna Jessen.
And Mark Steyn writes in his column:
Santorum’s respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell’s employees seemed to find anything “weird” about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking ’em home and holding a funeral, right?
At some distant point in the future of the West, historians will note that at a certain point, Westerners started killing their own offspring by the MILLIONS, year in and year out, and lost any serious commitment to family and marriage as institutions upon which society rested. They were at the same time oblivious to the consequences of such a suicidal development, heedless of well-reasoned warnings, and even mocked people of good conscience who believed that every child conceived has a inalienable right to life, and that children are best raised within an intact family with their biological mothers and fathers. Such beliefs critical of the Sexual Revolution of Death were labeled as "fringe" and "extreme" by those bent on the path to societal extinction.
Mr. Kushiner,
Let it also be said about our descendents that one was thought of as an "extremist" if he opposed taxpayer-funded abortions. How disgusting and misguided is that?
Posted by: Briana | January 09, 2012 at 11:40 AM
Am I the only one who thinks this holocaust, this modern-day slaughter of the holy innocents, is just one of the reasons our nation is under God's judgment? Ora pro nobis.
Posted by: Citizen Jerry | January 09, 2012 at 03:59 PM
The odd thing about decadence is that it is so darned decadent!
Posted by: Deacon Michael D. Harmon | January 09, 2012 at 04:26 PM
"At some distant point in the future of the West, historians will note that at a certain point, Westerners started killing their own offspring by the MILLIONS, year in and year out..."
Wow, what a great slippery slope argument! Never takes long to drum out the logical fallacies here, does it?
Posted by: Len Miller | January 10, 2012 at 10:48 AM
Mr. Miller, are you implying that the quoted statement is a slippery slope argument that this killing of offspring "will" happen? It is not. It is reporting the fact that this has been happening for almost 40 years with over 50 million of our "offspring" killed already. Every argument against abortion during the 1970's has proven to be horribly, grossly, offensively accurate. Increase in numbers of abortions, unwed pregnancies, percentage of unwed mothers, broken homes, live birth killing of infants. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls...
Posted by: Joseph Stringer | January 10, 2012 at 11:08 AM