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Rick Santorum Announces - Craziest GOP Candidate Yet?

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okonkolo6/06/2011 11:42:44 am PDT

The Santorum thing I can’t get out of my head is his poor premie child, born too early and died at birth, something so sad I wouldn’t wish that on an enemy. But then it gets weird Santorum style as he and his wife took home from the hospital for… family photos. From, WaPo:

Upon their son’s death, Rick and Karen Santorum opted not to bring his body to a funeral home. Instead, they bundled him in a blanket and drove him to Karen’s parents’ home in Pittsburgh. There, they spent several hours kissing and cuddling Gabriel with his three siblings, ages 6, 4 and 1 1/2 . They took photos, sang lullabies in his ear and held a private Mass.

“That’s my little guy,” Santorum says, pointing to the photo of Gabriel, in which his tiny physique is framed by his father’s hand. The senator often speaks of his late son in the present tense. It is a rare instance in which he talks softly.

He and Karen brought Gabriel’s body home so their children could “absorb and understand that they had a brother,” Santorum says. “We wanted them to see that he was real,” not an abstraction, he says. Not a “fetus,” either, as Rick and Karen were appalled to see him described — “a 20-week-old fetus” — on a hospital form. They changed the form to read “20-week-old baby.”