Ponnuru, contra Ornstein, thinks Santorum has legs:
Going after Santorum’s “highly charged statements” would present dangers for Romney that I doubt he will want to take. Again the contrast to Gingrich is instructive. There is no significant Republican constituency that is invested in the claim that the welfare state made Susan Smith drown her kids, or that people like him are what stands between us and Auschwitz, or that the failure to qualify for the Virginia ballot was comparable to Pearl Harbor. There is one for the view that homosexual behavior is immoral.
Ramesh worries that Santorum might also "lecture" the country about the evils of contraception, not something with a huge constituency even among evangelicals. But what makes Santorum Santorum is not that he just believes that homosexual sex and contraception are immoral – but that the government has a vital and legitimate role to penalize private sexual consensual acts if they are not within a heterosexual marriage. Santorum is quite explicit about this, and based his opposition to the Lawrence vs Texas decision on exactly those grounds:
If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.
He does not believe that you have the right to adult, consensual sex in your own bedroom, if the government decides it's bad for society as a whole. That includes masturbation and contraception on exactly the same grounds as homosexual acts. All of them are sodomy and subject to government regulation. Santorum can say he is just referring to the role of the courts, not backing substantive legislation to criminalize private adult consensual sex. But it's clear he believes that such sex is a serious threat to civilization, and only prudential grounds should restrain the government's decision to enforce that morality.
Recall that Santorum is contemptuous of the whole idea of the pursuit of happiness, if it isn't regulated by Catholic natural law. He is opposed, in his own words, to "this whole idea of personal autonomy," not to mention "the idea that people should be left alone."
Santorum's slogan is "Faith, Family, Freedom." But it is more accurately described as Faith Family and Freedom That Doesn't Violate The Tenets of Faith and Family as defined by Santorum. This is what the Tea Party comes down to in the end: opposition to the whole idea of freedom or being left alone by the government. I'd be laughing if I weren't crying.
(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)
The Dish 