When Common Sense Becomes Controversial

Someone asked me at church last Sunday whom my "dream ticket" for president and vice president would include. (Yes, believe it or not, Americans can and do discuss politics at church — and it’s actually legal!) My answer was immediate: "Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio." Think of it. Pennsylvania and Florida. The Rust Belt meets the Sun Belt. A second generation Italian-American and a first generation Cuban-American. And both of them committed conservatives.

Then I realized that both men are Catholics, and that could be a problem, but not for the reasons John F. Kennedy faced a half-century ago when distrustful Protestant voters feared that a Catholic president might "take orders from the Vatican." Today, it is the out-of-touch snobs in the elite media who believe such things. Exhibits A and B are Santorum’s appearances Sunday on both NBC’s "Meet the Press," hosted by David Gregory, and ABC’s "This Week," with George Stephanopoulos. Both hosts insisted that Santorum — who arguably has put forward more practical proposals to create middle-income jobs than anyone else in the race — was making "social issues" the primary focus of his campaign. Santorum responded that he has been trying to talk about economics but the media is obsessed with his personal opinions on contraception and abortion.

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Stephanopoulos was especially obtuse. He seemed dumbstruck by Santorum’s statement concerning JFK’s 1960 "religion" speech, wherein Kennedy, then a presidential candidate, stated his belief that "the separation of church and state is absolute." Santorum said that statement made him "want to throw up." Not a terribly articulate response, perhaps, but he followed it with a pertinent question: Should people of no faith be the only ones allowed into the public square with their beliefs? To which Stephanopoulos conjured up a tweet (the new form of political analysis, apparently) from someone who wanted to know how Santorum could possibly represent an atheist. A darned sight better than Barack Obama represents me, I’ll wager. So tightly sealed is the bubble in which he lives, Stephanopoulos seemed almost disoriented in his confusion when Santorum criticized Obama’s insistence that everyone should go to college. Why would anyone oppose such an idea? Two reasons, Santorum argued. First, not everyone wants to attend college, nor should they be forced to do so when trade schools and job training are a better fit for that person. And second, the vast majority of colleges and universities are liberal incubators that destroy a student’s faith and crush his or her individual ability to think anything but politically correct liberal thoughts. Sixty-two percent was the staggering figure Santorum quoted for the number of students who enter a major college or university with a Christian faith — and leave without one. Faith in government to replace faith in God? No wonder Barack Obama wants everyone to go to college. George Stephanopoulos, David Gregory and their clique of overpaid media elites will oppose any candidate who dares to point out that a reverence for life and for monogamous, heterosexual marriage, devoted to the raising of children and the fostering of a strong family life, is preferable to the wreckage brought upon our culture by the sexual revolution, which has given us illegitimacy, STDs, abortion, divorce and poverty. Wouldn’t it have been refreshing to see Stephanopoulos, Gregory, or anyone else on the left, take as intense an interest in Barack Obama’s long relationships with his hate-mongering pastor, Jeremiah Wright or admitted terrorists Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn as they have in Rick Santorum’s personal views on birth control? And wouldn’t it be nice, just once, to hear someone — anyone — in the elite media suggest that Barack Obama’s vote in favor of infanticide when he was a member of the Illinois State Legislature was just a bit more "controversial" than Rick Santorum’s suggestion that traditional marriage and innocent human life are worthy of society’s protection. When evil is called good, and good is called evil, societies die. When common sense becomes controversial, we are on the brink.