In this write-up on my latest reading of Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good,
I'll highlight where Santorum tries to add a tone of moderation to his
controversial positions. Here are three areas in which he seeks to do
so:
1. Earlier in the book, Santorum appeared to argue that it's
preferable for a mother to stay at home rather than pursue a career. On
page 211, however, he states:
"The 1950s were not without moral
blemishes. Many conservatives recognize that there was something
unsustainable about the role of women made normative in that period, for
example. Allen Carlson has argued that whereas the household had once
been a center of productive activity, the advance of industrial
technology and suburbanization often left women with few roles beyond
those of infant caregiver and consumption specialist, i.e., shopper."
This sounds a lot like Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique,
which argues that consigning women solely to the domestic sphere leaves
them bored and unfulfilled, resulting in damage to the women and also
their families.
2. Santorum argues that Griswold vs. Connecticut,
the 1965 Supreme Court decision that struck down a state law against
the use of contraceptives and affirmed the right to privacy, was a bad
decision, a reason being that it established a right to privacy that
went beyond what the framers of the Constitution intended and set the
stage for Roe vs. Wade. But Santorum makes clear that he does not agree
with the Connecticut law against contraception, and that he believes
that the judges who decided Griswold vs. Connecticut were acting
according to a tradition of common law, which held that the government
should not intervene in the lives of married couples.
3. Santorum
criticizes Lawrence vs. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that
invalidated laws against sodomy. Santorum tried to clarify remarks he
made that this could set the stage for a right to bigamy, polygamy,
incest, and adultery. Santorum says that he was not equating
homosexuality with those things. But Santorum does argue that the
Lawrence decision has set the stage for state-sanctioned same-sex
marriage, and he notes that polygamists have challenged statutes against
polygamy on the basis of the Lawrence decision.
So does Santorum
support criminalizing homosexual sex? To be honest, it's tough to
tell. On page 215, he says that he's not in favor of the government
"snooping through people's private lives". At the same time, he does
appear to argue that liberty must coincide with virtue, and that a lack
of virtue leads to more government restrictions. Does that mean that
he's open to the government restricting people from doing what he
considers to be contrary to virtue? Of course, most people are for the
government prohibiting certain wrong behaviors (i.e., theft, fraud,
murder), but does Santorum think that homosexuality should be banned as
something that is not virtuous?