LifeSiteNews.com has the story about Ozzy Osbourne singing about Robert Latimer’s 1993 murder of his daughter, Tracey Latimer, who had cerebral palsy. LSN reports:

“To put your child to death is a big decision. I’m not one to go, ‘You’re wrong, you shouldn’t do that,’ or ‘You did the right thing,'” Osbourne told a CanWest reporter during a news conference.

So the rocker isn’t going to be judgemental because, you know, killing a kid is a “big decision.” And then you view some of the lyrics and not only is Ozzy not judgemental, he seems pretty sympathetic:

“The sun shines on this deadly new mourning/The church bells ring an early warning/Your eyes shine as I turn on the motor/The tears fall as the mercy gets closer.”

And:

“Another day and another full seizure/Another pill, you spiral down deeper/Another cut by a surgical butcher/It’s just a way of prolonging the torture … I won’t say I know what I’m doing/I won’t say I’m sorry/I can’t bring you back but I can’t leave you helpless/I’ll make the pain rest in peace.”

It’s a pretty one-sided view. Andrea Mrozek has presented another view of Tracey which people can’t see because they become focused on the disability.

They claim suffering, suffering, suffering on Tracy’s part, but always neglect to discuss her and who she was: Her personality, her preferences, her schedule, her day. Tracy Latimer was a sister and a daughter, who had favourite colours and foods, and was a part of a family just the same as me. And I mean that. Tracy Latimer was no less a person than I.

We editorialized about Latimer’s “lax treatment” by the National Parole Board, concluding, “Her disability should not be treated as a mitigating factor. To suggest that her disability is a mitigating factor creates an inequality in our justice system providing less protection for people with disabilities.”

I had a longish post on Robert Latimer on my own blog Sobering Thoughts back in February 2008 when the National Parole Board gave Latimer day parole (scroll down to February 28), the gist of which is this:

What gets me more upset, though, is that Robert Latimer was Tracy’s father. A dad is supposed to protect his daughter, not kill her. A dad is supposed to care and love his little girl, not put her in a truck, pipe deadly gasses into the cab, kill her, put her body back in bed and lie to his family later about killing her. For me, more than anything else, this case is about betrayal. I assume that before he killed Tracy, Robert Latimer loved her and played with her, fed her, held her and did all the other things fathers do for their daughters, only more. So I imagine that as Robert Latimer was preparing Tracy for her death, she assumed that he was taking her somewhere and that all would be all right; she was, after all, with her father. But there would be no trip to the doctor’s office or school or a relative’s house. She would be alone in that cab, suffocating from fumes and noxious gas. How can a father do that to his daughter?