Rick Santorum was a speaker at the American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Mo., Feb. 3. He chose to speak on euthanasia in the Netherlands. He said:

“ . . . In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And one bracelet says: ‘Do not euthanize me.’ Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but half of the people who are euthanized — 10 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized 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.”

Outrageous, you say. It would, indeed, be an outrage if there were an ounce of truth in it. But there isn’t. It is all a fabrication. 

Santorum’s remarks spawned headlines in Holland: “Rick Santorum Thinks He Knows the Netherlands: Murder of the Elderly on a Grand Scale.” The uproar prompted an investigation. Fact checker, Glenn Kessler, went to work. He discovered the Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia in 2001, setting forth a complex process. The law codified a practice that had been unofficially tolerated for many years. Under Dutch law, a doctor must diagnose the illness as incurable and the patient must have full control of his or her mental faculties. The patient must voluntarily and repeatedly request the procedure and another doctor must provide a written opinion agreeing with the diagnosis.

Nevertheless, the fact-checker wrote, statistics show it is still a relatively uncommon form of death. In 2010, the number of euthanasia cases reported to one of the five special commissions was 3,136. This was a 19 percent increase over 2009, and amounted to 2.3 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands in 2010. More than 80 percent were suffering from cancer and almost 80 percent died at home, not in the hospital. 

So how about the bracelets? They simply don’t exist. The closest thing to them are the living wills which the Dutch, along with a great many Americans, prepare and sign. The documents express the person’s desires for end-of-life treatment. Allen County Hospital routinely asks patients to have a living will on file.

Mr. Kessler, who by coincidence is the son of Dutch immigrants to the U.S., was unable to find any evidence backing up any of Santorum’s claims. The whole story was made up from whole cloth —a tissue of lies.

THIS MAN WANTS to be President of the United States. Yet he has no respect for the truth. The accusations he made about the Netherlands and the Dutch people were as vicious as they were false. They were so outrageous in their implications — imagine a modern nation in which hospitals routinely murder elderly patients! — that any decent person would make absolutely certain of their truth before repeating them in a public forum. Santorum obviously made no such effort.

Santorum’s hatred of euthanasia is so intense, and the lies about Holland fit his prejudices so perfectly, that he gave thanks for the calumny and proceeded to spread it around the globe.

Now imagine him as president, the person who sets the tone for how the United States of America deals with its allies, such as The Netherlands, and every other nation around the globe. 

— Emerson Lynn, jr.

A tax plan that would sharply reduce state income and hit the poor hardest was put together by Republican leaders in the Kansas House and is up for consideration.

It should be buried six feet under.

Like the tax reforms proposed by Gov. Sam Brownback, changes in the income tax would cut amounts paid by middle and upper income folks and increase the amount paid by those earning under $25,000 a year. 

It is truly hard to believe that any Kansas lawmaker could support such an elitist — and brutal — approach to financing state government.

The increase on the poor comes from reducing the tax credit earned by low-income workers. The House is a bit more compassionate than the governor. Rather than eliminate the earned income tax credit entirely, as Brownback would, it merely cuts it in half.

The EITC is paid to low income workers in recognition of the fact that many can’t get by on what they earn. It is a combination of welfare to the workers and state subsidy to the businesses that pay low wages. The negative income tax —as it is also known — was the brain child of the late Milton Friedman, a conservative icon, has wide and broad support. 

If it is to be repealed, it should be replaced by a state minimum wage high enough to compensate workers for the loss. Nothing of the sort is about to happen in the Kansas Legislature. What the governnor and the Republican legislators have in mind is taking money from the poor and giving it to the well-to-do.

The legislation on the floor also reduces the state sales tax to 5.7 cents on the dollar from the present 6.3 percent. This reduction, combined with lowering the income tax brackets at the upper levels, would reduce state income by more than $850 million over the next five years, budget experts estimate.

That’s $850 million not available for education, highways, law enforcement, health care and the other things government does for the governed.

THE JUSTIFICATION for this destruction is that tax cuts will stimulate the Kansas economy, create jobs and produce more income for families than they had before. Coincidentally, lowering taxes pleases those who pay the most taxes and, in turn, give the most to politicians. 

The first justification is highly questionable. There simply is no proof that beggaring government strengthens the economy or has ever done so in the past. 

The second reason for slashing tax rates at the upper levels is a clear winner. Please guess which motive is the most compelling.

—Emerson Lynn, jr.

More than half of the children being born to women under 30 these days are born out of wedlock.

Jason Departe and Sabrina Tavernise, reporters for the New York Times, made this discovery reading “Child Trends,” a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

The pair looked deeper. They found that having children out of wedlock has become a class thing. Ninety-two percent of women who are college graduates are married when they give birth. These women are also most likely to have comfortable incomes and to stay married. The youngsters born to such couples are far less likely to have emotional problems, drop out of school or, it goes without saying, fall into poverty. 

Nonmarital births also are connected to race: 73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared to 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites.

While most of the nonmarital births occur to women who are living with a man, the data also showed that such relationships are more than twice as likely to dissolve as are marriages. When they do break up they most often leave a single mother with the responsibility of raising the child. Single mothers make up the poorest slice of the poverty-stricken in the U.S.

When social conservatives such as Rick Santorum look at these facts, they declare the collapse of the American family is at the root of our problems and call for a return to bygone values.

What they do not provide is a roadmap. 

Today’s culture has been created deliberately through millions of individual decisions made over decades. Perhaps the most formative feature of the rich world today is the freedom women have to shape their own lives, to earn their own way and be as creative in as many ways as their talents, their energies and their determination levels allow them to be. The liberation of women has had a profound effect on the American family.

The more recent economic blow dealt to working class men by the lower wages and benefits caused by globalization that has made them less valuable as mates also has made marriage less essential to the formation of a household.

The combination of liberated women and weakened men may explain why there are fewer traditional families — and why the trend is likely to persist.

— Emerson Lynn, jr.