Alan Colmes earlier today made a despicable remark about how the Santorum family grieved over their child, a remark for which he had to later apologize.
Colmes faced off with National Review editor Rich Lowry, who responded to a question on whether or not undecided voters will truly stick by Santorum when it’s time to cast a vote. Colmes answered, saying that his rising support will stop short once people “get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after child birth home and played with it so that his other children would know that the child was real.”
Lowry cut off Colmes, calling the statement “a cheap shot.”
“To take something that is that personal and that hurtful as losing a child and mocking it like that … that is beneath you, Alan,” he said. “What you’re saying is contemptible.”
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It was more than a cheap shot, it was using someone else’s tragedy to make a political point. The flippant way he described taking baby Gabriel home was an attempt to make light of a horrific time for the Santorum family. They did not take the child home to “play with him” but because they felt before they sent him to his eternal resting place he should become a “real human being” to his siblings.
He and his wife, Karen, have seven children – including, as Santorum puts it, “the one in Heaven.” Their fourth baby, Gabriel Michael, died in 1996, two hours after an emergency delivery in Karen Santorum’s 20th week of pregnancy. The couple took Gabriel’s body home to let their three other young children see and hold the baby before burying him, according to Karen Santorum’s book of the ordeal, “Letters to Gabriel.”
Santorum’s wife described the aftermath to Gabriel’s death in a heart breaking way.
Gabriel Michael Santorum was born at 12:45 AM on Friday, October 11, 1996. He was a beautiful boy. He did not give a cry or open his tiny eyes. We baptized him, bundled him, and held him ever so close. We sang to him, held his little hands and kissed him. Gabriel lived for two hours. In those two hours something simple but profound happened. Rick and I became parents to a newborn baby and welcomed him into our family. That was all….but it was everything. His life was so brief, yet his impact so great. In two hours we experienced a lifetime of emotions. Love, sorrow, regret, joy—-all were packed into that brief span. To have rejected that experience would have been to reject life itself.
I pray that Colmes never has to face the pain of losing a child to learn what he would do in the face of such a horrible tragedy. He has no right to make light of the pain of others.
Then again, this is the same Alan Colmes who accused Sarah Palin of causing her son’s Downs Syndrome. via Prenatal neglect Not only does that belay genetics at the time it was the most disgusting thing I have ever heard from a liberal commentator. But today Colmes topped himself.
Apparently even Colmes realized he went too far. Santorum appeared on Hannity later in the day and said Colmes apologized.
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Apology or not, Colmes should demonstrate rhetorical skills equal to his experience in punditry and avoid such hurtful, downright petty attacks in the future.
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