The Santorum Legacy
Just days after he won the Iowa caucuses (at the time, he was a close second until additional votes were found and counted), Santorum began the race to the dark ages:
Rick Santorum thinks Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that invalidated criminal bans on contraception, was wrongly decided. He’s off the deep-end on this one, and completely out of touch even with his fellow Catholics, but his statement provoked an exchange at last night’s debate about whether states should be permitted to ban birth control.
Mitt Romney feigned surprise — and emphasized that he would be absolutely, positively against banning birth control — but the moderators failed to ask him about his enthusiastic support for “personhood” bills that would effectively ban certain kinds of birth control (not to mention fertility treatments). Santorum turned the question to be all about the Griswold ruling on a “penumbra” of rights created under the constitution, anathema to conservatives because of how it underpins Roe v. Wade, and, as Chris Geidner points out, Lawrence v. Texas. They claim these rights are not actually found in the Constitution but were created by “activist judges” — this from the people who think the 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection to fertilized eggs.
At his press conference today, Santorum alluded to reproduction and procreation by praising the family as “the moral enterprise that is America,” and by specifically thanking the 19 Kids and Counting Duggars for campaigning for him. It might have sounded like a standard political homage to wholesome family life, but to anyone who knows Santorum’s views, it was an homage to uber-fertility. As Kathryn Joyce noted here last week, it rings of Quiverfull:
It’s the movement that looks to the Duggar family as de facto spokespeople (even if the Duggars have often hedged whether or not they consider themselves a part of it), and that so venerates the role of proud “patriarch” fathers leading their families—comparing them to CEOs and generals—that it’s easy to see where Harris’ appraisal of Santorum’s family-man qualifications come from. In this election, and the birth control debate that has become a significant part of its soundtrack, the convictions of the Quiverfull community seem to have made a mainstream debut.
Santorum’s speech this afternoon was suffused with other religious imagery, calling Good Friday his family’s “passion play” because of his daughter Bella’s hospitalization; he talked about “witnessing” for Americans’ stories and voices, and belief in miracles. Miracles, that is, for the true believers, not the Kennedys who want to keep religion out of governing, or the mainline Protestants whose congregations are supposedly in shambles, or the believers in “phony religion.”
I wrote about the Quiverfull influence a couple of weeks ago, here. I think he succeeded in doing exactly what he set out to do:
“A President Rick Santorum will start an ongoing national discussion about family, marriage and fatherhood”
“One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is what I think is the danger of contraception. The whole sexual libertine idea that many in the Christian faith have said, well, it’s ok, contraception’s ok. But it’s not ok.
It’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. It is supposed to be within marriage. It is supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal and also unitive but also procreative and that’s the perfect way that sexual union should happen. When you take any part of that out, we diminish the act.
If you can take one part out, if it’s not for the purpose of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons you diminish this very special bond between men and women. So why can’t you take other parts of it out? It becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure…
I’m not runnning for preacher, I’m not running for pastor. But these are important public policy issues. These have profound impact on the health of our society. I’m not talking about moral health, although clearly moral health, but I’m talking economic health, I’m talking about out of wedlock birth rates, sexually transmitted diseases.
These are profound issues that we only like to talk about from a scientific point of view. Well that’s one point of view, but we also need to have the courage to talk about the moral aspects of it and the purpose and rationale for why we do what we do. “
Good bye Ricky. It’s been real.