WhatFinger


Can't conservative commentators, at least, stop addressing all moral issues in terms of the simplistic opposition of "open-mindedness versus bigotry"?

Rick Santorum Exposed!



-Satire Rick Santorum has gone and done it now. Foolishly winning everything in sight this week, he has put himself in the unenviable position of being noticed. Why is it unenviable? If you don't know, then clearly you have not been paying attention to those steadfast warriors for freedom, the Republican media. With the microphones around Santorum actually having been turned on in recent days, we are suddenly finding out just how extreme and out of touch he is. We now know that over these past few weeks, for example, he has put his foot in his mouth big time—not once, but thrice. The boob trifecta! Step over to the fifty-seventh state, Mr. President, here comes the new champ.
Are you ready, folks? Here goes: Over just the past month, Santorum has said, (1) he thinks homosexual behavior is inconsistent with his Catholicism, (2) he thinks most men feel more protective towards women than they feel towards other men, and (3) he thinks radical feminism has damaged the traditional family. (I'll give you a moment to stop laughing and catch your breath.) If you are calm enough to continue, let's look at the context of these absurd gaffes. (Oh yes, they are indeed "gaffes." How do I know that? The conservative media tells me so.) The first whopper, regarding homosexuality, dates back to early January, but, by the purest coincidence, it has found its way back into the light now, within hours of Santorum's wins in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. Talk about luck!

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As Roger L. Simon reports, Santorum, speaking at a New Hampshire high school, said, "Marriage is not a right. It's a privilege that is given... by society for a reason.... We want to encourage what is the best for children." What a nut that guy is. Where could he get such notions? And that isn’t the worst of it. According to Simon's recounting of a January LA Times story, Santorum then "suggested" that even a father who "is in jail and has abandoned" his family is better for a child than two gay parents. (As Simon himself points out, "suggested," as it appears in the original story he is reviving, may imply that Santorum did not actually say this—presumably he "suggested" it in the process of trying to answer a deliberately provocative challenge from the audience.) Let me see if I understand this: A Catholic who believes that homosexual acts are unnatural, and therefore that homosexual couples should not be allowed to marry, also believes, as an extreme case, that a traditional family, even a badly broken one, would be better than one founded in an unnatural relationship. Crackers! Or, to quote Simon's pithy response, "Whoa." The ugly part of all this, as Simon says, is that Santorum was speaking at a school in which as many as three students had gay parents. Scandalous! It's as if one were to speak to a high school audience about the destructiveness of alcoholism, when a few of the students have alcoholic parents; or as if one were to speak to students about the dangers of pre-marital sex, when some of the students are already sexually active. Insensitive cad! Has no one taught Santorum the first rule of discussing morals with young people? One must never—absolutely never—actually say anything about morals, lest someone's feelings be hurt. But all of that is just the recent, restrained Santorum. Simon has also done some research, and has dug up the real dirt on the former senator's views on homosexuality, from 2003. Quoting Santorum from that time: "In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." Simon refers to this, understatedly, as "a rather peculiar analogy." Peculiar in its subject matter it may well be, but straightforward in its content: No sexual relationship, apart from that between a man and a woman, has, "to his knowledge," ever been treated as a basis for marriage. Controversial remarks, to be sure. Simon quotes Santorum further from that same 2003 interview: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." Simon generously allows that these ideas may have been misquoted by the interviewer. After all, if we don't grant Santorum that escape, then we must accept that he has committed himself to the bizarre position that entrenching a specific "right" to consensual sexual acts would open a constitutional can of worms, and leave no way to define the limits beyond which further, subsidiary "rights" might not be developed through litigation. Whoa—these slippery slope arguments are just ridiculous! As if simply declaring a right to consensual acts in the privacy of one's own home could lead anyone to suggest new, unorthodox legal extensions of that right. I mean, is there any evidence that the various right to privacy cases over the past fifty years have gradually led to people proposing strange new notions, like marriage between two men or something? Er, uh, okay, bad example, but you get my point, right? (If you don't get my point, perhaps you'll get this point, in support of Santorum's point, made by a lawyer who happens to be a gay marriage advocate, on his website devoted entirely to sodomy laws.) That's enough for me regarding the homosexuality gaffe; my sides are already hurting. So let us move on, then, to the other two humdingers, as reported by the Washington Post's "Right Turn" writer, Jennifer Rubin. These are the gaffes about women. First up, on the question of whether women should have more active frontline combat roles in the military, Santorum offered this: "I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved. It already happens, of course, with the camaraderie of men in combat, but I think it would be even more unique if women were in combat. And I think that’s not in the best interests of men, women or the mission." If I may paraphrase for those who have been properly indoctrinated, and are therefore impervious to the peculiarly antiquated thinking at work in Santorum's remarks: Men in dangerous combat situations often face difficult, mission-risking emotional conflicts based on personal attachments to their comrades in arms. This situation, Santorum is suggesting, might be exacerbated, thus leading to a greater chance of missions being compromised, if the men in such crises were considering the risks to female counterparts, rather than to other men. If I may translate further, for those too young to understand such an ancient idea, he is saying that the men might be "naturally" (don't ask!) disposed to feel especially protective of the women at their sides. Of course, there is no conceivable reason why warriors under the stresses of battle in a foreign land could not, and should not, be trained out of any such genteel notions as feeling protective towards women, so Santorum's point is obvious nonsense. Gaffe alert! Rubin's reply to this disaster: "Such remarks may please some social conservatives who were never that keen on women serving in the military, but this may not sit well with women who work, sometimes in male-dominated jobs." A grand point, deserving of forceful restatement: Women who work, especially those who work in "male-dominated" jobs, will resent the implication that men generally have stronger protective feelings towards them than towards their fellow men. Next thing you know, Santorum will be caught on camera holding a door for his wife. Caveman! Like Simon, Rubin finds that Santorum's recent outrages are just the tip of the iceberg—for the really good (oops! I mean "troubling") stuff, you have to go back several years. (Interesting, isn't it, that both of these conservative pundits seem to think it so necessary, at this exact moment, to rummage through every bit of Santorum's past in search of his dreaded "social conservatism" controversies.) In 2005, she explains, Santorum, speaking to the issue of families in which both parents work, while their children are cared for by others, wrote the following: "What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else—or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon—find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism. Sadly the propaganda campaign launched in the 1960s has taken root. The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.” Matching Mr. Simon's "Whoa," Ms. Rubin responds to this quotation with a monosyllable of her own: "Yikes." And we can well understand her shock. Just think about this: Santorum has the gall to suggest that 1960s feminism was responsible for changing attitudes towards the traditional family and the role of women within society. What poppycock. After all, everyone knows that feminism had no such intentions or effects—it was just a social network for exchanging recipes. Just ask Shulamith Firestone, one of the women at the forefront of the so-called second wave of feminism—the self-proclaimed "radical feminists"—whose most famous book, from 1970, is called "The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution." This book, as its title clearly implies, is focused primarily on cupcakes and muffins. What in the world was Santorum thinking? Or is Rubin's "Yikes" a response, not to the absurd implication that feminism was responsible for the alteration of the modern family, but rather to Santorum's tone of disapproval? On that point, Rubin has a suggestion to get Santorum out of this pickle he seems to have created: "Santorum might want to rethink that and figure out a way to walk back some of that. With women making up almost half the workforce (and now out-numbering men among workers with at least a bachelor’s degree), Santorum’s remarks sound badly off-key. Perhaps he’ll walk back his comments on CNN and explain he’s rethought what he wrote in his book. In such matters, the sooner he does that, the better." Her points are well-taken: (1) Every woman with a job is a feminist who will hate Santorum for speaking out against feminism; (2) Every mother with a job believes that women should choose career over child-rearing; (3) Conservative presidential candidates ought to make a priority of avoiding upsetting the sensibilities of women who fit Santorum's description of those who work while their children are cared for by others, or are left home alone after school; and (4) In general, presidential candidates ought to "rethink" and "walk back" any principles that might ruffle anyone's feathers. (After all, that's what Romney does, and look how many Washington Republicans are voting for him!) Open and shut case: Unbelievable as it may have seemed before these revelations, it turns out that Rick Santorum is a Catholic who tries to adhere to the explicit moral teachings of this nutty cult he shares with seventy-seven million Americans, and a billion people worldwide; that he espouses one of the fundamental tenets of what used to be called gentlemanly behavior, namely a special sense of protectiveness towards women; and that he believes that a family is best configured along lines very broadly similar to that proposed by every significant moral theorist in history, unless we lower the threshold of significance far enough to include Marx. Crazy. Or perhaps, in the name of rationality, we might consider this: Believing that mothers ought to feel a special responsibility to their children does not imply a hatred of women, or a denial of their right to seek gainful employment. Disapproval of gay marriage, or of homosexual acts—the Catholic Church believes the act is a sin, but not the desire—does not imply hatred of homosexuals, or intolerance towards those with such inclinations. (Plato's "Symposium," by far the most profound work ever written on the subject, neither makes the case for gay marriage, nor even comes down unequivocally in favor of the morality of the homosexual act—while nevertheless addressing the feelings with the utmost respect, not to say reverence.) We all know that modern liberals are beyond saving on intellectual matters. But can't conservative commentators, at least, stop addressing all moral issues in terms of the simplistic opposition of "open-mindedness versus bigotry"? Or must this remain one more arena in which the Left has won the cultural debate for all time?


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Daren Jonescu -- Bio and Archives

Daren Jonescu has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He currently teaches English language and philosophy at Changwon National University in South Korea.


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