If You Don't Want Your Personal to Be Political, Don't Make Your Personal Political

From Whiskey Fire.-SS

If You Don't Want Your Personal to Be Political, Don't Make Your Personal Political:

An NRO twerp is shocked, shocked, that the Liberals are being mean to Rick Santorum over the dead baby story.

Certain liberals cannot help themselves but to bring up this intensely personal incident and showcase it as evidence that Santorum is somehow unfit for the presidency. This is who they are. When they cite the old phrase, “the personal is political,” they mean it; no personal act, thought, or moment is off-limits in the name of their agenda. Pundits opine at all kinds of topics, but God help the newspaper columnist who believes his purpose in life is to decree which forms of mourning the loss of a child are okay and which ones are too “weird” for a potential president.

If the Santorums wanted to keep this "intensely personal incident," you know, personal, Mrs. Santorum could have not published her book about it, and Mr. Santorum could stop waving around this cross he's bearing whenever he thinks it will sccore him points with sympathetic political audiences. Steve M makes the case definitively.

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.

It's not like vicious liberals were spying on the Santorums: the Santorums publicized the death of their infant to score political points.

Who does that?

The people most directly responsible for "making the political personal" in this sordid episode are the Santorums -- they are the ones for whom "nothing is off-limits in the name of their agenda." In the most crass possible way.

Besides that, if the Santorums want to be accorded respect and dignity for how they handle their most intimate and "intensely personal" decisions, they could, you know, stop calling for the entire power of the national government to be employed to deny other Americans their right to make such decisions for themselves in the first place.

Because while, sure, "people who have just lost a child should be given, simultaneously, a wide berth and unjudgmental support," if these "people" flaunt their pain in order to advance an agenda that disrespects other peoples' right to make their own difficult choices, I'm sorry, I'm going to say impolite things.

Rick Santorum wants "respect my values" to mean "respect my authority." No.

MAS. As if called by Heaven to illustrate.

Many Catholics that I have spoken to, including the clergy, have grown weary of those who claim they were victimized by a priest decades ago and are still not satisfied with the Church’s response. No matter what the Church does—doling out millions, providing endless counseling and therapy, mandating training sessions for every employee to guard against abuse—it’s never enough. It’s time for some straight talk: these people don’t want to move on, and that’s because they have too much invested in maintaining their victim status.