Santorum's supporters denounce the government's religious interference, but it's their mantra that feels like oppression
I can't imagine that anyone on the Obama re-election team ever thought they'd be so lucky as to run against Rick Santorum; even now, one senses a kind of incredulous bemusement among when they are asked to respond to the former senator's more strident remarks.
They can rise above Santorum's social conservative mud-slinging without raising a sweat. Last Sunday, Robert Gibbs, an Obama campaign adviser, used Santorum's accusation that the president had a "phony theology" to plea for civility. We have to, Gibbs said, "get rid of this mindset in our politics that, if we disagree, we have to question character and faith," an assertion that appeals to a conviction that most Americans cling to more strongly than any religious affiliation: the right to be left alone.
As I've written before, I think it's Santorum's comfort with judging (and interfering with) the private lives of others that raises the hackles of voters who don't already agree with him. Social conservatives, Santorum chief among them, have tried to paint the administration's support for mandatory coverage of birth control by insurance companies as an imposition of beliefs on its own. When Santorum claims that the policy means that Obama "has reached a new low in this country's history of oppressing religious freedom that we have never seen before," he's relying on American's long-held distrust of government to blind us to real-life workings of the policy he describes. In practice, it's preventing people from using their insurance to cover birth control costs that feels like government interference, on the way to oppression.
The ability to control when and if we have children isn't a luxury anymore, it's a right as fundamental to our understanding of personal freedom that I'm not even sure most voters give it a second thought. Involving insurance companies, and employers, complicates the issue somewhat for some people – but not so much that it makes the president's policy unpopular.
Believing that employer-subsidized birth control is "a new low in oppressing religious freedom" requires perverting the meaning of "religious freedom" such that it actually means "only my religion," a singleness of vision that Americans just don't share.
As a country, we are more tolerant of religious diversity than most clerics of any stripe would prefer: 70% of Americans who claim affiliation with a particular denomination agree that "many religions can lead to eternal life," an admirable expression of broadmindedness but kind of a buzzkill as far as unique selling propositions go.
Santorum is on record supporting his particular flavor of worship as a killer app; mainline Protestants, he's said, are "gone from the world of Christianity as I see it" – the closest we'll get to an admission of his impossibly narrow vision. Almost all of Santorum's opinions on social issues require a kind of intellectual blinders to make sense, some of them might even demand a different set for each eye. He wants to make divorce more difficult but believes marriage is making babies – a set of positions that logically leads to the kind of unhappy families that make people avoid marriage. He is adamant in opposition to abortion but balks at providing women with prenatal care.
These positions are as almost as unpopular as they are nonsensical: Americans' support for same-sex marriage grows year by year, and refusing to pay for indigent women's pre-natal care can lead some pregnant women to abortion.
Santorum is ahead in national polls on the strength of his meaningless wins in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota and, more to the point, not being Mitt Romney. This election cycle has shown again and again that Republican candidates rise in the polls only to sink again once the public gets to know them. Santorum has undeniable appeal: he is passionate, earnest, genuine and eloquent when it comes to his beliefs. Unfortunately, the more people find out about those beliefs, the more they will see not just how different they are, but how the beliefs themselves encourage the suppression of difference, whatever appeals to freedom he might make.
Obama's supporters can only hope that Santorum embraces freedom of expression, when it comes to religion or anything else, as broadly as possible, and keeps talking.
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