One of the interesting things about the rise of Rick Santorum is that it’s giving a lot of people their first up-close-and-personal look at some of the more — what to call them? — unorthodox beliefs that animate American movement conservatives. They really do believe that we liberals support prenatal testing because it’s a good way of ensuring that Down’s Syndrome kids are all aborted. They really do believe that widespread contraceptive use has led directly to dissolution and cultural decay. They really do believe that “freedom of worship” is a dog whistle used by President Obama to indicate his contempt for religious liberties. They really do believe that global warming is just a hoax designed to allow lefty elites to seize control of the means of production.
And they believe that Europe is a post-socialist hellhole run by Godless bureaucrats and doomed to disintegrate. For example, here is Rick Santorum peddling a common myth:
In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And the bracelet is: ‘Do not euthanize me.’ Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but half of the people who are euthanized — ten percent of all deaths in the Netherlands — half of those people are enthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, they will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness.
This Soylent Green version of life in the Netherlands attracted my attention because I ran across it a while back and took the time to look into it. I’m not going to bother digging up all the references a second time, but basically this is totally untrue. The bracelets don’t exist. Euthanasia accounts for only about 2% of all deaths in the Netherlands. And Dutch safeguards are, in fact, quite effective. No system is perfect, but virtually no one in the Netherlands is euthanized without explicit, repeated requests — and the tiny number of violations of the rules are mostly technical. No one is allowed to die who doesn’t want to.
But the Dutch myth persists, and Santorum is doing nothing more than repeating something that’s a commonplace in movement conservative circles. Glenn Kessler, whose family is originally Dutch, provides all the facts here. Not that it will make any difference. These myths simply never die, and the movement conservative machine has already produced dozens of defenses of Santorum’s statement. They want to believe in the secular annihilation of everything traditional and decent, so they’re going to believe whether it’s actually true or not.
