[Vision2020] Santorum and the Sexual Revolution

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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March 2, 2012
Santorum and the Sexual Revolution By CHARLES M. BLOW

Rick Santorum wants to bring sexy back ... to the 1950s, when he was born.

That is because Santorum seems to have an unhealthy fixation with, and
passionate disdain for, the 1960s and the sexual freedoms that followed.

To fully understand Santorum’s strident rejection of the 1960s, it’s
instructive to recall a speech and question-and-answer session he gave in
2008 to a course on religion and politics at the Oxford Center for Religion
and Public Life in Washington.

The speech was interesting, but the answers he
gave<http://www.ocrpl.org/?p=99>to the questions that followed were
truly illuminating.

In response to a question about the kinds of words he had heard “attached
to religion and politics” during his years in the Senate, Santorum ventured
off onto sex:

“It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to
freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of
the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all
of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy. And you’re dangerous
because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s the most
central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at.”

Next a commenter falsely claimed that my colleague Maureen Dowd “said that
the Republican Party is trying to repeal Woodstock.” It was a
misrepresentation of a 1998
column<http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/13/opinion/liberties-honour-in-a-shallow-cup.html?ref=maureendowd>she
had written about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. What she actually
wrote
was:

“Since Watergate, there has been a pendulum of partisan revenge. And, right
now, Republicans want their payback for Watergate, for Bork, for
Iran-contra, even for Woodstock. Like Kenneth Starr, the Republicans are
attempting to repeal the 1960s.”

But let’s not let facts slow us down. Santorum, predictably, deflected back
to sex:

“Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has
become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most
basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s
not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about.
Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom. All of the things are about
sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them. They try to somehow or
other tie this to the founding fathers’ vision of liberty, which is
bizarre. It’s ridiculous. That’s at the core of why you are attacked.”

The next question was: “Do you see any possibility for a party of Christian
reform, or an influx of Christian ideas into this [Democratic] party?”

Santorum’s answer included what? That’s right: Sex!

While explaining what he saw as a shift in the Democratic Party away from
“blue-collar working-class folks with traditional values” Santorum said:

“What changed was the ’60s. What changed was sex. What changed was the
social and cultural issues that have huge amounts of money because if you
look — I haven’t seen numbers on this, but I’m sure it’s true — if you go
socioeconomic scale, the higher the income, the more socially liberal you
are. The more you know you can buy your way out of the problems that sexual
libertinism causes you. You have an abortion, well, I have the money to
take care of it. If I want to live an extravagant life and get diseases, I
can. ... You can always take care of everything. If you have money, you can
get away with things that if you’re poor you can’t.”

The questions finally got around to asking about sex directly, much to
Santorum’s delight, I’m sure. To one of those questions Santorum answered
in part:

“Sex is a means. Evolution is a means. And the aim is a secular world. It’s
a, in my opinion, a hedonistic, self-focused world that is, in my opinion,
anti-American.”

Santorum may now cloak his current views in Catholic fundamentalism and
Constitutional literalism, but, at their root, they are his reaction to,
and revulsion for, the social-sexual liberation that began in the 1960s.

In fact, Santorum’s distaste for the sexual revolution of the 1960s leaks
over into a deep dislike of everything that the 1960s represents. Santorum
continued in the question-and-answer session:

“You’re a liberal or a conservative in America if you think the ’60s were a
good thing or not. If the ’60s was a good thing, you’re left. If you think
it was a bad thing, you’re right. And the confusing thing for a lot of
people that gets a lot of Americans is, when they think of the ’60s, they
don’t think of just the sexual revolution. But somehow or other — and
they’ve been very, very, clever at doing this — they’ve been able to link,
I think absolutely incorrectly, the sexual revolution with civil rights.”

Maybe that’s why he has such a dyspeptic reaction to the 1960 speech by
John F. Kennedy, in which he said that “I believe in an America where the
separation of church and state is absolute.”

Santorum said that the speech made him want to throw up because it was an
“an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960.”

Nothing could be more absurd. James Madison, “Father of the Constitution”
and fourth president of the United States, wrote in 1822 that:

“Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation
between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have
no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done,
in showing that religion and government will both exist in greater purity
the less they are mixed together.”

Santorum’s stances are not about our Constitution, but his. He views
personal freedoms as a personal affront. His thinking exists in a pre-1960s
era of aspirin-between-the-knees contraception and read-between-the-lines
sexuality.

The kind of conservatism that Santorum represents has been described as a
war on women, but I would rephrase that. It’s a war on sex beyond the
confines of traditional marriage and strict heterosexuality in which women,
particularly poor ones, and gays, particularly open ones, are likely to
suffer the greatest casualties.

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/CharlesMBlow>and follow me on
Twitter <http://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow>, or e-mail me at
chblow at nytimes.com.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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