Former Senator Rick Santorum is a theocratic homophobe with a scary social agenda, and it would be a major disaster for the nation and the world if he were to be elected president. His views on the role of government having a say in personal decisions such as birth control, marriage, and social engineering are setting him up for a copyright infringement lawsuit from the Taliban. He deserves all the scrutiny and righteous criticism for his obsession with the lives of absolute strangers in order — in his mind — to make the world a better place.

However, there is a place I’m not going to go, and that’s his family’s decision on how to grieve over the loss of a child. Perhaps you’re familiar with the story, but in brief, his wife Karen gave birth to a child with severe birth defects that allowed him to survive for only a few hours. They brought the dead child home and allowed the other children to see him and say goodbye.

A number of people have commented on this choice, expressing revulsion or creepiness. They point to it as an indication of how outside the mainstream Mr. Santorum’s views about the sanctity of life and how abortion is murder regardless of the result of the pregnancy.

But the grieving process is intensely private and personal, and each of us deals with a loss in our own way. While you might find the Santorum family’s choice “weird,” it’s not up to you or anyone else to pronounce judgment on how they grieved.

As Booman writes in a poignant post on the subject, both pregnancy and grieving are intensely private things. So if there’s anything at all to note about Mr. Santorum’s story of the loss of his child, it is that he deserves as much respect and privacy as he would deprive from those women and families who make the intensely personal and private choices about what they can or must do about their own bodies.