Mama He's Lazy

It isn't hard to read the headline: "Santorum Defends Satan Comments" and think, "oh boy, here we go again."  I've been pondering for weeks what exactly to say about Rick Santorum.  I even thought for awhile that I might avoid saying anything at all in the mistaken hope that he would fade away as a candidate--or maybe be forced out by a tragic sweater vest accident.  Alas it wasn't to be.

Therefore, my basic conclusion is that Rick Santorum isn't crazy, he's lazy. 

I admit that crazy is the more popular moniker, and it doesn't require an opposition research team to build the case.  I also allow that accusing a law school educated, eight time father, former congressman, former senator, and leading presidential candidate of being lazy is to risk appearing mentally unstable myself.  Nevertheless, that is what I'm going to try and do.


Despite--or God forbid because of--the almost daily revelations of strange pronouncements on everything from birth control to Satan, Rick Santorum has been steadily building his poll numbers at the expense of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.  By now a familiar pattern has emerged: Santorum or someone very close to his campaign is quoted as saying something such as "an aspirin between the knees is the best form of birth control," and Mr. Santorum responds by chiding the media for bringing up the issue in the first place.  The Wall Street Journal suggests a glaring double standard in which cultural issues and Biblical references are only scrutinized when coming from Republicans. 

Yet it is Mr. Santorum who has built a career of being a lightning rod on cultural and social issues.  Surely the body of evidence is sufficient to warrant scrutiny.  President Obama may sometimes quote scripture, but no one thinks he sits above the East Room reading Papal encyclicals.  With Mr. Santorum, one just isn't sure-- and this is a legitimate reason for a double standard.

I don't question his sincerity or his faith. He is clearly devoted to America and to God. At the same time it is obvious that Mr. Santorum is an intelligent guy who knows a lot.  He knows a lot of Catholic theology, a lot about American constitutional law, and a lot about foreign policy.  What's less clear is whether he knows a lot about the arc of human history. 

It is easy to imagine the world Rick Santorum pines for.  A world in which fathers work hard to support their devoted, stay-at-home spouses and the couple's six children.  Families take care of each other and their extended clans.  Women are relieved not to have to work outside the home.  Neighbors look like each other, work at the same factories or mines, and attend the same Sunday church services.  Neighborhoods are full of happy, healthy kids raised by God-fearing parents to be self-sufficient, productive members of society.  Deviations from these norms are avoided through proper parenting and enforcement of morals.  Thus, there is no worry about having single mothers, drug abusers, or homosexuals to burden the government or undermine cohesion in the community. 

Importantly, I don't believe he is trying to recreate sitcoms from the 1950s.  This world is less one of black and white TV Land re-runs and more of a pre-industrial--one might dare say tribal-- culture.  And this is his biggest failing.  A reluctance to do the intellectual heavy-lifting of reconciling an agrarian, tribal--alas Catholic-- worldview with the 21st century.  It is true that in a by-gone world, homogeneity amongst clans was a source of safety and viability.  It is true that large families were important in a sparsely populated, dangerous, and labor intensive world.  When gathering food by manual labor dominates the day, large families with strict discipline are a matter of survival.  Marriage traditions, inheritance laws, and strict sexual mores are the primary, interconnected means of ordering society and preserving civilization. 

In many ways Mr. Santorum is right.  Birth control liberates women from domesticity and creates complications in the rearing of children.  Acceptance of gays complicates the basic organizing unit in society: families.  Abortion distorts decisions about long-term relationships by removing consequences of casual sexual encounters.  At the end of the day, he is right that his theology and his world view are one way of enforcing organization in society.  It is even easier to imagine how much people welcome this message.  It is a message of simplicity.  It prescribes familiar sounding solutions for a society so complex we often have trouble adapting. 

However, they are not the only solutions, and they are not viable solutions in our modern world.  Whatever the consequences of these changing modes of human organization, the job of society and its leaders is to facilitate human choice and freedom while finding other methods of preserving safety, cohesion, and civilization itself. 

Certainly there are ways for Mr. Santorum to achieve his objectives within the proper context of a modern, globalized republic founded on liberty.  No one disputes the desirability of productive, self-sufficient citizens peacefully living with each other and working in their own ways for the collective benefit of the society at large.  Unfortunately, he has thus far been too intellectually lazy to reconcile these legitimate goals with a proper perspective on human progress.  As a result, a sincere, smart, well-intentioned man often simply sounds crazy.