SHELBY TOWNSHIP — Rick Santorum admitted as much.
“I know I’m preaching to the choir,” he told an audience of about 400 persons Aug. 9 at the Palazzo Grande in Shelby Township.
The occasion was the second annual fundraising dinner for Birth Choice, a pregnancy resource center in Clarkston.
The theme was pro-life. The message, the words of Blessed Pope John Paul II: “Be unafraid.”
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“I encourage you to go out and sing, a solo, trios, quartets. We can win this battle. ... The truth is on our side.”
Santorum, of course, is the former congressman and senator from Pennsylvania, and former Republican Party candidate for president.
He and his wife, Karen, are parents of seven children, including their youngest, 4-year-old Isabella, born with a chromosomal defect condition called Trisomy 18. In Washington, Santorum championed legislation outlawing partial-birth abortion and a number of other bills that have a common theme: that every individual has value and the most vulnerable in society must be protected.
Using Isabella as an example, Santorum said society looks at people such as her “from a utilitarian perspective, asking ‘What can she do?’ That’s the wrong question. It doesn’t matter what she can do. She is.” And he repeated: “She is.”
Santorum said this was the “fifth or sixth” appearance he has made on behalf of pregnancy resource centers such as Birth Choice. “I love them because they are on the front line of reaching out to those in a crisis and providing God’s love.”
His observations from his travels across the country have made him “optimistic about the pro-life movement,” Santorum said. “The number of abortions is going down, and young people are becoming more pro-life than before.”
Shannon Wygant, president of the Birth Choice Board of Directors (and father of four children, including three adopted), saw the need for such a center from his own family’s experience. “A pregnancy center reached out to my sister with open arms and helped her make the right choice,” he said.
Birth Choice opened an office in the spring of 2011 on Main Street in Clarkston on the second floor, above an abortion clinic. Board member and retired nurse Dianne McMillan related the story about the clinic closing its doors a few months later and how a young woman “came into our office, thinking we were the abortion clinic. We counseled her (to have her baby) and she became our first adoption.”
Santorum urged the crowd to encourage their legislators to vote on pro-life issues. “It’s a real test for a politician to stand up and be counted,” he said, knowing first-hand the consequences. Those include “being put in a box as an ‘extremist’ by the media,” and called “the inconvenient candidate” by even some in his own party, Santorum said.
“Even people who don’t agree with us know the truth in their hearts,” Santorum said. “We need to be witnesses in public life to the truth.”
His closing note: “Be faithful, be unafraid. God will reward that.”
Teresa Tomeo, syndicated Catholic talk show host who emceed the event, echoed Santorum’s remarks in her introduction of him. “This is a great battle, a spiritual battle we are engaged in. We can do it together.”
Fr. Tim Hogan, vicar for the clergy in the Archdiocese of Detroit, offered the opening and closing prayers in the place of Auxiliary Bishop Arturo Cepeda, whose flight from a conference in Chicago was delayed by inclement weather.
