I posted the other day about Alan Colmes mocking — and then apologizing for mocking — the manner in which Rick Santorum and his family mourned their child who died shortly after birth.
Now Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and MSNBC has done the same (via Commentary, h/t @CharlieSykes):
First it was Alan Colmes; now it is Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who went on MSNBC to mock Rick Santorum for how he and his wife Karen dealt with the death of their son Gabriel. (A severe prenatal development led to his very early delivery, and Gabriel died two hours after his birth.)“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.”
The Commentary post quoted the official page of the American Pregnancy Association (an association of health-care providers that treat pregnant women) about stillbirth:
With the loss of your baby, your family members will also grieve. Your baby is someone’s granddaughter, brother, cousin, nephew or sister. It is important for your family members to spend time with the baby….
Sounds like good advice, and a situation no one should have to be in.
Few have defended this line of attack on Santorum, but one left-wing blogger feels that Colmes (and presumably Robinson) was not tough enough on Santorum:
You go to his office as a Post reporter and he makes certain you focus on this incident in his life, and makes sure you know he uses the correct right-to-life shibboleth. Whatever this may have been at the time for Santorum and his family, by now it isn’t a tragedy for him — it’s a marketing bullet. He brandishes the kid as a medal he and his wife earned in the culture wars. He’s shameless.My opinion? Colmes isn’t hard enough on him.
Update 1-6-2012: Eugene Robinson clarifies criticism of Santorum
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