At a time when Presidential candidates are going at each other tooth and nail - ex-girlfriends being paraded before the camera and wholesale financial inquisitions making the headlines - it seems odd that one particular event has escaped much attention. Apparently, it's too dicey, too rooted in taboos about death and
religion for anybody to mention. Nobody can be certain that he who raises it might not end up looking worse than he who did it.
I am talking about the decision by Rick Santorum and his wife Karen to bring their dead child (a 20-week old fetus named "Gabriel") home from the hospital so their children could bond with him. They hugged, talked to, and interacted with the corpse freely so that they might remember him. Remember, this wasn't a doll. It was a dead baby.
To the best of my knowledge, this rather unorthodox episode was questioned once, in an early debate, and then dropped. Santorum answered it calmly and rationally, speaking about the need for his children to understand that their unborn brother was a real person, not some kind of vague metaphor. His actions are certainly consistent with his view that people are people from the moment of conception.
My concern is not with Santorum's beliefs, which I do not share, or even with the appropriateness of bringing a dead baby into the home for children to see and engage with. Rather, it is with the question of why few if any of the other candidates or journalists have dared raise this topic in an otherwise heated political climate where personal oddities and misbehaviors all seem like fair game.
I think the answer is quite simple: The issue involves death. More specifically, it involves dead bodies. We don't like dead bodies and we don't like talking about them a whole lot either. There is a massive taboo surrounding them in our culture. Films like Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1973), Night of the Living Dead (1968) and other zombie extravaganzas exploit the taboo and the feelings that lie beneath it. When it comes to corpses, we seem to go to extremes. We either parade them across the silver screen to gross out audiences, or we sweep them under the carpet, so to speak. We quietly burn them to a cinder or embalm them to forestall decomposition. We put them in bags or boxes and stick them in the ground or in mausoleums where we don't have to look at them. We don't allow them to rot normally. We embalm them or place them in lead-lined caskets to keep the normal ravages of time and decay from occurring. The only exception I can think of is Judiasm, where embalming is discouraged and funerals usually take place within 24 hours. Many of us not employed as doctors, nurses, soldiers or police have never seen a dead body; fewer have touched one. It's yucky business, even when it involves our own loved ones.
But don't get the wrong idea. This aversion is not about grief. It's about disgust, pure and simple. And such disgust is well founded. Dead bodies, both human and animal, decay quickly and get smelly fast. They harbor deadly bacterial diseases. Even the thought of rotting animal tissue can sicken us. Much has been written lately about "The Ick Factor," as the New York Times has called it. This disgust is as good an evolutionary mechanism as there is to keep us out of harm's way. No matter how much you loved Uncle Joe, you want his rotting carcass out of here for good reason.
As Pascal Boyer argues brilliantly in his book Religion Explained, most religions offer strict rules for how to handle the dead. If you are a practicing member of a faith, you don't have to wonder what to do with Uncle Joe's body. Boyer puts it quite simply: the bedrock of religion may be in specifying how to deal with dead bodies. Not with death, but with dead bodies. Admittedly, that's not the view you get in Sunday school, but it makes damn good evolutionary sense.
And so does the horror some of us feel at what the Santorums did. They brought a dead baby into their home! That's disgusting! Their children touched it! Cradled it in their arms! Talked to it. Sang to it! Yuk! But that taboo is matched nearly equally in American culture by the one about not criticizing somebody else's religion. You just don't stand up in a public forum, especially if you want to be elected President of the United States, and say to somebody, "What, are you nuts? You believe that?" That may even be worse than letting your kids bond with a dead baby.
Rick Santorum's wife, Karen, a pediatric intensive care nurse, has written a moving narrative of her loss of their child and their decision to bring the dead body into their home. The Santorums' religious, social and political beliefs are their own business. But Rick is now running for public office as President of the United States. The stakes couldn't be higher for all of us. Yet at the end of the day, nobody dares to say anything to him about this episode because it might be interpreted as holding his religious beliefs up to ridicule. If Santorum had been caught with an alter boy or a campaign worker or a prostitute of either gender, he'd be out of the race. But with the dead baby thing, we just cut him some slack.
Sources:
Pascal Boyer: Religion Explained (2001)
Karen Santorum: Letters To Gabriel (1998)
Rabbi Mark Washofsky: Jewish Living: A Guide to Contemporary
Reform, Practice.
Survival's Ick Factor, New York Times, January 23, 2012
Departures (film; 2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/
Photo title: Krissy
