I absolutely do not want to defend Mariner.
However, I've been seeing comments like his pop up by other people on various Santorum-related threads. Unfortunately, while others who are political opponents of Santorum are saying similar things, this is the first case I've seen that people saying things like this have been attacked.
Don't get me wrong; I'm glad Mariner is being attacked. His comments need to be criticized — but so do those of a number of other people who have said similar things without eliciting similar responses.
The fact is that Mariner and other Freepers have a point. While Santorum’s actions with his infant child are consistent with a pro-life position, even if it's something I might not have chosen to do, Santorum’s actions **WILL** seem very strange to a lot of secular Americans. Mariner is right that it could easily turn into a nasty political attack — we already saw how Sarah Palin’s children turned into fodder for attacks on her.
I hope enough mothers who have had a miscarriage will say, “Hey, I'm not going to stand in judgment over a family's way of grieving” to keep this issue from damaging Santorum. Love for kids is not just a conservative value, and enough pro-choice liberals sincerely believe that these issues are between a woman and her doctor that many will respect the Santorum family's choice and method of grieving, even if they themselves would have aborted a pre-born baby or quickly gotten rid of the body of a stillborn infant.
The problem here is that those of us in the conservative pro-life movement are sometimes blinded to just how insidious the “culture of death” has become in America. Another Freeper had it right when saying that liberals hate large families. It goes beyond that — many liberals hate people like Santorum (and Sarah Palin) who believe it is their God-given obligation to protect the mentally handicapped and others who “take up resources.”
I wish it were only liberals who thought that way. When Mariner calls us “lifers,” it may indicate a fundamental disconnect from our values.
I don't want to say Mariner believes this, but there is a certain type of conservative who says (at least quietly) that rich parents have every right to do what they want with their own family, but if a poor parent doesn't have the resources to take care of a seriously handicapped child, the child would be better off not being born. Some of them will say that if a Catholic or evangelical Protestant hospital wants to provide free or low-cost medical care for parents who can't afford a neo-natal clinic, it's up to them, but the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for the cost to bring “undesirables” into the world.
That mentality has precedents in ancient Sparta and, more recently, in Nazi eugenics. It is, at root, the Planned Parenthood approach to improving the human race through family planning — it just uses conservative economic arguments to achieve that end rather than the more familiar liberal arguments.
Both the conservative and liberal versions of that argument are wrong, both are dangerous, and both need to be rebuked.
The pro-life movement's main enemies are in liberal political circles and that's where we need to focus our fire. Ayn Rand-style libertarian-leaning conservatives agree with us on enough things that it's usually best for both sides to grimace, agree to disagree, and vote for conservative candidates with whom we can agree on most things.
However, if we as conservatives ever succeed in driving European-style liberalism out of our country's political culture, we're going to have to deal with secular conservatives who simply do not share our pro-life values.
God is merciful, but He is also just. I sincerely hope that if we as conservatives ever win this culture war, people like Mariner will learn from their pro-life conservative colleagues and change their views. If they don't change their views, sooner or later they'll meet God's justice at His hands in eternity no matter what happens in the political realm.
Politically, we need to work with secular conservatives. We simply have no choice in modern American politics.
Theologically, God does not need Mariner, and he doesn't need me or anyone else. His justice will rule, and considering that America has killed more babies through eugenics than Hitler ever did, do we think God's justice is going to be any less severe with us than it was with Germany in the 1940s?
Let's think long and hard as conservatives how we're going to deal with this attack on Santorum. It has the potential to divide the conservative movement. We simply do not need and cannot afford that division this year. People like Mariner need to be told that Santorum’s family has a right to grieve the way they want, and that is consistent with libertarian ethics. I think that's a winning argument not only with libertarians but also with liberals.
Another simple way the santorums explained it is that their little children 6 and under would not even know there was a little brother. The baby must have appeared perfect. If he had been grossly deformed they would not have shown Jim to his living siblings. To me it seems lime what they did was to respect their precious child and his too-short stay. Their hearts were broken. Anyone who would choose not to vote for him on this basis is cruel.
Not true.
I am 100% Pro Life politically, socially and personally.
However, this is not a Life issue.