An open letter to Rick Santorum

Dear Mr. Santorum -

You have presented yourself, in your run for the presidency, as a candidate of religious and moral values. I recently saw you quoted as saying that "the left has a religion, too. It’s just not based on the Bible. It’s based on the religion of self." [David Brooks, New York Times column, January 3]

I try to pay you the compliment of believing that you are well intentioned. Just yesterday, though, you were further quoted as telling the mother of a son who had survived cancer that people with pre-existing conditions should pay more for health care coverage because they make poor health care choices. [Igor Volsky, http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/01/06/399357/santorum-to-mother-of-cancer-survivor-sick-are-to-blame-for-their-pre-existing-conditions-insurers-should-charge-them-more/?mobile=nc]

I can speak to your comments from a position of unique and painful authority. My wife recently died after decades of steadily worsening health due to radiation treatment she received for a brain tumor at 23. Without my group health insurance, she would have been unable to obtain any coverage at all.

Your position reminds me of comments made by some of the people at her parents' church, who told them that she must have done something terribly wrong for God to punish her in that way.

I'm sure you would qualify your statement, as you did to the mother of the son who had survived cancer, by assuring me that my wife did nothing wrong. Nevertheless, you are supporting a system that allows her and other innocent survivors of debilitating diseases to be treated as statistics and judged by whether they serve a corporate bottom line.

I urge you to consider the possibility that you are endorsing a position that has nothing to do with Biblical values, and everything to do with a societal ethos that makes everybody into a statistic and has rendered corporate profits more important than healing lives and saving souls. Perhaps our opponents' faults are always more visible than our own. From where I stand, though, you appear to be pursuing a religion of self with a single-minded intensity that is deeply offensive to many people who have been touched by serious illness.

Please back off and do some real soul-searching. You are causing genuine pain to people who have suffered much pain already. In doing so, you are undermining your claim to speak with moral authority, and are giving voice to the cruelest and ugliest forces in our public life: forces that are a profound threat to both religion and morality.

Sincerely,
Robin Wallace