Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board whom I normally agree with, wrote a particularly scathing criticism of Rick Santorum in today’s Op-Ed pages that bears responding to. Her hypothesis is rather simple, a “large sector” of the American electorate will find Senator Santorum’s pronouncements on social issues, “unpalatable, to put it mildly”.
In short, reading between the lines, Senator Santorum’s discussion of moral and social issues makes Ms. Rabinowitz uncomfortable. This is a mildly bizarre position since some of the best evidence that Senator Santorum is right on these issues has come from the WSJ’s pages over the years, but nevertheless, we must make room for the possibility that Ms. Rabinowitz does not read her own paper.
So what examples does Ms. Rabinowitz give of these unpalatable positions? Her first example is Rick Santorum’s visceral reaction to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on the separation of church and state.
In that speech, President Kennedy promptly essentially tries to create a wall between church and state that cannot possibly exist. Why? Because he calls for decision making that is completely absent of religious influences and that is just intellectually dishonest. Every man who is truly a man of faith will take that into account when they make a decision. The ultimate judge for any man is not the voters of this earth but the constituent of one God in heaven.
So given that, the choice is either to ignore their religion or to assume, as Kennedy lays out in that speech, that they do not agree with all of it (how you know which parts I don’t know). Both of those are to our own peril as we’ve seen in the past few months. Any attempt to question Barack Obama’s faith in 2008 was shot down, but yet as he works to eradicate all conscience protections, it might have been helpful to know what kind of Christian he was.
Her next example has to do with comments that Santorum made in his 2005 book about contraception being, “harmful to women”. Clearly Ms. Rabinowitz is not aware that oral contraception is classified by the American Cancer Society (among others) as a known Level I carcinogen right alongside tobacco and asbestos. Sound research exists demonstrating a clear linkage between oral contraceptives and a specific type of breast cancer, whose incidence has skyrocketed over the past several decades. Would this not count as being harmful to women?
But more to the point, Senator Santorum has made clear he does not intend to impose his beliefs about contraception on the nation. That is not Barack Obama’s position based on the HHS mandates and Ms. Rabinowitz seems to be asking Catholics and conservatives to unilaterally disarm on these issues.
Ms. Rabinowitz goes on to criticize Santorum for remarks about having a problem with homosexual acts. Perhaps Ms. Rabinowitz is not aware that voters in 31 states, including such noted conservative hotbeds as California, have voted against the legalization of gay marriage. Surely that suggests at least some uneasiness with homosexuality?
And for her final haymaker, Ms. Rabinowitz opts to go with an attack on Senator Santorum’s remarks about public schools last weekend. I could fill all of the pages of a year’s worth of WSJ editions with all of the statistical evidence that public schools are a failure. I live in Chicago, where Mayor Emanuel has ostensibly taken over control of the public schools, as has happened in numerous other cities, in a desperate attempt to turn them around.
At the end of the day, if this is all of the examples that Ms. Rabinowitz can provide to support her discomfort with Rick Santorum, then I am frankly happy that Ms. Rabinowitz is uncomfortable. It is time that Rockefeller Republicans became as outdated as that phrase.
There is ample evidence to demonstrate now that our social ills are tied to our fiscal ills. The more government expands, the more the traditional family shrinks. As families shatter, the government then shells out trillions more in social services trying to compensate for broken families. Then government expands to pick up the slack left behind. We are on a treadmill to nowhere.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater fought a seemingly doomed campaign for President. He was deemed a right wing nut job. But he gave birth to the political career of Ronald Reagan and the modern conservative movement. Every movement has a start.
It may also be worth reminding Ms. Rabinowitz that 4 years ago the Democratic Party nominated a rookie Senator, who attended Rev. Wright’s church for 20 years, and who launched his political career in the living room of a known, unrepetant, domestic terrorist. Vegas probably would not have given you odds on it, but today he is our President. So I think we have to be careful about deciding what, up front, will or will not doom a candidate.
I think it is legitimate to criticize Senator Santorum for not going all the way and articulating the linkage between our social ills and our economic ills. That is the argument that needs to be made, to force the segment of Americans like Ms. Rabinowitz to get off the fence and engage in these issues. Right now they live in a fantasy land where these uncomfortable things don’t have to be discussed and we can pretend that every choice is equally valid.
I don’t know that Senator Santorum is the man to make that argument, but I do know if it took us 16 years after Barry Goldwater to get Ronald Reagan, we had better get started on this movement now. Unless we resolve to once again be one nation under God and strengthen our families, we may not have 16 years.
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