The latest on Rick Santorum

I don’t usually post in the pit, but there’s nowhere else to put this:

From here.

Ew!

If this is true ( :eek: ), count me in the goulish camp.

They let you take a human corpse home these days?

I simply won’t judge someone for their actions immediately after losing a child and you shouldn’t either.

Just one more reason I’m getting out of this GD state…

IIRC, there was a Minnesota politician who’s wife died while she was several months pregnant. He had the baby removed and put into the mothers arms for the open casket.

I forgive folks their foibles in grief I guess. Heck, my mother and grandmother broke down laughing as they lowered my grandfater into his grave.

Sounds like some players who get their night with the Stanley Cup. I wonder if they poured beer into it and drank out of it and used it to bathe their other infants.

In Santorum’s world, sleeping with another man is evil. Necrophilia is okay though. What a sick fuck. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t really do that anyway but only said it to build a legend and show what a great, holy man he is while proving his point about how evil abortion is.

This bears repeating. I agree.

I’d like to say “To each his own” on this one, but they dragged the kids into this. To me, this is a little icky.

Your grandfather was Chuckles the Clown?

Sorry! JUST a joke…

This wasn’t necrophilia, jackass (if it’s even true.) But you already knew that.
It sounds pretty freaking weird and ghoulish to me too, but I’m inclined to side with treis on this one.

Oh, come ON. That is really low. They SLEPT with their dead baby, they didn’t have sex with him. Calling something like that “necrophilia” does a lot more to make you a sick fuck than sleeping with his dead kid for a night does to Santorum.

That’s what I’m wondering about. Human bodies start to decompose immediately after death. I could see if the hospital let them keep the baby for a night, since the body wouldn’t have rotted away much in a few hours, but I don’t think any doctor in his right mind would let someone take medical waste (and that’s what dead human bodies are) home so susceptible children could nuzzle it. True, dead human bodies aren’t as germy as some people think they are, casual contact wouldn’t be harmful, but there could still be problems if the necrotic tissue touched the inside of a kid’s mouth or if its blood mingled with one of the kids’, and of course there’s the psychological issues with letting kids play with their sibling’s rotting body. I don’t see a hospital greenlighting this.

I highly doubt the story’s true, but if it is, then it’s the doctor’s fault more than Santorum’s. Not to defend the guy or anything (I hate him and I’m deeply ashamed he’s from my state), but I can see how a grief-stricken person would want to do this. It would be up to the doctor to prevent it from happening.

I’m going to ask my father about that one-he’s a mortician, so he might know whether or not that’s kosher.

(That and my father hates Santorum with a bloody passion).

I really really really really despise Sen. Santorum, and the “missionary in the Senate” bit troubles me immensly, but I’m with treis and why not on this. I’m not going to judge someone’s actions on the death of their child.

Of course if he is using this story for political gain that would be beyond reprehensible, but the link gave no evidence of that

You know, I usually let the Santorum bashing circle jerks just roll right by, because there’s little I can say that would change anybody’s mind here.

I have spent a bit of time with the man though (though not for many years). I met his wife while they were still dating. I volunteered for his first congressional campaign and worked as an intern for him while he was still a congressman.

So I’m on pretty solid ground when I tell you that Karen Santorum understands a baby’s death better than any of us does, and for that reason alone ought to be let off of the hook here.

Karen Santorum was a neonatal nurse for several years, and it’s a safe bet that she saw many babies die during this period of her life. All three of my kids were born prematurely and spent time in a neonatal ICU, and there are few people I hold in higher regard than NICU nurses.

I especially admire ones who go to school during this time and become lawyers, which is another thing Karen Santorum did.

She is in many ways a more impressive person than her husband is, a fact he freely admits. So when she grieved over her own dead child, it wasn’t some country bumpkin doing it. It was someone with a full understanding of what a baby’s death can do to a family, now going through it herself.

Now, you don’t have to agree with what she did, and you don’t have to like her or her husband or their politics. But making them a figure of fun because of how they chose to mourn their dead child seems a bit beyond the pale to me.

Karen Santorum isn’t nearly as well known as Rick Santorum is, so I hope I did my part to fight a little ignorance tonight.

I respect your perspective (and position) but if that story is true, it is sick and wrong. Even more so if she was a nurse who knew better. At best (as the apologists say) they were not accountable because of their grief, and that is at least believable (tho still not excusable IMHO) and at worst, a blatant lie/play for the ultra-right-wing vote. Either way, this is abnormal human behavior, detestable to the masses and worthy of any and all derision.

I just find it surprising they were able to take the body home. I wasn’t allowed to take an extracted tooth home.

As far as their methods of dealing with the pain, I find it… disturbing, but understandable.
As far as Mr. Santorum’s professional life, I find it disturbing, and unacceptable.
I wish Ms. Santorum the best.

I am not an apologist, what I am is a decent human being that won’t use a man losing his child in order to denigrate a political opponent.

I just got done talking to an IRL nurse. She said there is about… ZERO chance of a hospital letting a couple take their dead child home for even one night. This leads me to only one conclusion. Santorum deliberately fabricated this story to further his own right-leaning ends.
Riffing off of the death of your own child. Nice!