"Mysterious, Paridoxical"? Sounds Like Your Article

Yahoo!'s The Ticket ran an article yesterday on Rick Santorum's book he wrote before his losing senate campaign. The book is called It Takes A Family, an obvious play on Hillary Clinton's mantra.

The book is getting Santorum heat on the talk show circuit this week.

 On "Meet the Press," host David Gregory challenged Santorum to defend his book's claim, "The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness." Rather than try to justify his implicit critique of women of childbearing years finding fulfillment in the workplace, Santorum vaguely affirmed a woman's right to choose her career and gallantly insisted that "the section was written in large part in cooperation" with his (non-working) wife, Karen.

Author Walter Shapiro seems to be unable to make up his mind about the book.

From this TV exchange, it would be easy to assume that Santorum's book is a political screed filled with short paragraphs, wide margins, angry put-downs of liberals and lots of exclamation points. And, in truth, Santorum's language does get overheated at times: "We now have a generation that has grown up with the belief, inspired by the Sixties' free-love assault on sexual mores, that true love is a feeling, and that it should not be resisted or constrained--rather, its ultimate validation is through sexual relations, without regard to the outdated social convention of marriage." (Unless he was a particularly precocious conservative, Santorum is channeling the opinions of others in his scorn for the Sixties. He was 11 years old at the time of Woodstock).

Or, and this is just a wild idea I'll throw out there, people after the sixties can have negative opinions about that era that are their own. I'm noticing a common theme when it comes to Yahoo!, any idea older than the 70's is backwards and troglodyte-or worse, unenlightened.

 But Santorum, in his zeal to be taken seriously as a thinker, mobilizes a wide array of social-science research (including some citations from liberals) to buttress his argument that hedonistic individualism is jeopardizing traditional families and their irreplaceable role in raising children. This, of course, is an explosive topic--and it is unlikely that Santorum can win many converts among liberal and moderate skeptics. But it is hard not to be impressed by the energy that Santorum devotes to his argument.

And of course, there's Santorum's ideas on how to approach poverty, which Shapiro deems "obtaining liberal goals through social conservative means." (because of course everyone knows helping the poor isn't something conservatives want to do)

"In developing my understanding of social policy," Santorum writes, "I have learned a lot from the tradition of Catholic social thought." Here Santorum is referring to the Catholic concept of "subsidiarity," which he defines as "the principle that all social challenges should be addressed at the level of the smallest social unit possible, preferably the family." This belief structure is compatible with the embrace by constitutional conservatives of the Tenth Amendment and the states rights doctrines that go with it. But it also allows Santorum to discuss innovative family-based and church-based approaches to fighting poverty.

It's amusing that Shapiro can't figure out what to make of Santorum. From what he pulls out of the candidate's book, he strikes me as similar to most hard-line conservatives. Apparently Shapiro can't comprehend someone who is passionate and well thought out.

Shapiro's right about one thing: Sanotorum's going to have fun defending this:

The other intellectual pillar buttressing Santorum's worldview is his legal education. Sometime, presumably early in his studies at Penn State's Dickinson School of Law, Santorum was introduced to the concept of the slippery slope--and it changed his mental life. In It Takes a Family, Santorum repeatedly warns about the legal consequences flowing from popular Supreme Court decisions. He laments the reasoning behind the 1965 Griswold decision (overturning--yikes!--a Connecticut law that banned the sale of condoms) because it introduced the constitutional zone of privacy that later allowed the Supreme Court to legalize abortion. Santorum even expresses his concern with the precedent set by Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 civil-rights decision that decreed that states could not ban interracial marriages. What troubles Santorum is not the result (ending Jim Crow legislation) but that "16 years later, the IRS ruled that religious groups opposed to interracial marriage could be stripped of their tax-exempt status." [Emphasis added]