I finished Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good.
In
my latest reading, Rick Santorum reaffirms a point that he made earlier
in his book. Up until now, I have not gotten around to mentioning this
point in my posts on Santorum's book, but I consider it to be
important. Rick Santorum states on pages 423-424:
"The corrupting
of our moral and cultural capital by the village elders has had
devastating effects on the poor. The cultural artifacts of the village
elders teach us the lie that there are no negative consequences and no
alternatives to the self-centered pursuit of pleasure...Here too the
poor suffer much more than the village elders, simply because they
usually don't have strong families and networks to fall back on and have
fewer resources to recover from the consequences of their actions.
When a son of the Bigs lives the self-indulgent life the village elders
prescribe and ends up with multiple addictions, there is always rehab
and a second, third, and fourth chance. When the son of the poor single
mom does the same thing, he ends up either in a gang, on the street, in
jail, or dead."
I'll let that quote stand, without commenting on it.
Overall,
I enjoyed this book. That doesn't mean that I agreed with all of it,
and you can read my posts to see where I agreed and disagreed. The
positives of the book: Santorum's inspiring anecdotes about people who
do the right thing (i.e., helping the poor, choosing to clean up their
lives to become responsible parents, etc.), his down-home advice about
parenting, the conversational style of his book, his concern about the
entertainment media (without going overboard and favoring flat stories),
and the times that he tries to understand liberal arguments and either
acknowledges that liberals have valid concerns or offers fairly decent
counter-arguments. The negative: his us vs. them mindset, as he
stigmatizes the so-called village elders.