Political campaigns are never exactly polite, but when they get ugly, they really get ugly. Consider Fox News commentator Alan Colmes’ callous attack on former Pennsylvania Senator and rising Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum for, of all things, Santorum’s immediate reaction to the death of a son in childbirth:

Once they [Republican voters] get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two hour old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple hours, so his other children would know the child was real […] I’m not mocking the losing of a child, but what I’m saying is I think it shows a certain unusual attitude […] a certain lack of judgment, I think it shows a certain behavior which is questionable. And I think it’s something people do think about and consider when they’re looking at a candidate.

It didn’t take long for Colmes to apologize to the Santorums, and for good reason—this was revolting on several levels. There’s the hypocrisy of a self-professed liberal, supposedly paragons of enlightened, non-judgmental tolerance, presuming to judge how a family grieves after a personal tragedy. There’s the dishonest, condescending suggestion that they “played with it,” not-so-subtly implying that maybe a denial-stricken Santorum tried to pretend his baby wasn’t really dead, when the truth was just the opposite:

Rick Santorum explained to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that Gabriel had died in the middle of the night and that he and his wife stayed with their child in the hospital, bringing him home the next day for a private funeral, rather than sending him directly the morgue.

Karen Santorum was a neonatal intensive care nurse for nine years. Rick Santorum told Hannity that his wife learned from that and taught him, “You have to affirm the life of your child. You have to affirm that memory for your children, and for you– and to recognize the dignity of that life and to make sure that that child is forever a part of your family. And that’s what we did. And I can tell you it was a tremendous healing experience for all of us.” 

Neither in the book nor elsewhere did the Santorums suggest that no one could disagree with their decision. But bringing Gabriel home was part of helping their children realize in a tangible way, Rick Santorum said, that  “they had a brother and who he was.”

This has been the general thrust of the (plentiful) Colmes-bashing this week—that he was cruel, arrogant, disrespectful of privacy, etc. That’s all true, but it doesn’t answer how the man could stoop so low. Raw partisan hatred of a political opponent is part of it, but the main reason Colmes didn’t think twice about it, and the reason why he so flippantly dismissed the disgusted response of National Review’s Rich Lowry, is simple: Alan Colmes has no real understanding or appreciation for the sanctity of human life. Colmes is a dyed-in-the-wool pro-abort who has defended Planned Parenthood on their statutory rape cover-ups and made excuses for Barack Obama’s record on infanticide, even to abortion survivor Gianna Jessen’s face.

If someone has spent years conditioning himself to believe that life in the womb is disposable, that there’s nothing real or precious about it until after birth, it follows that such a man wouldn’t understand the Santorums’ effort to “affirm the life” and memory of Gabriel, and wouldn’t hesitate to sneer about it being “crazy” and “questionable.” However unintentional it may have been, Alan Colmes has actually done pro-lifers a service by so vividly demonstrating how the culture of death’s ideology can poison the human heart.