How 'bout that Santorum . . .

Lots of other smart bloggers have already drawn attention to Santorum's visit on Stephanopoulos's show. Go to Crooks and Liars or SantorumExposed to see the video.

Pandagon and Bitch PhD. are doing fine work exposing how utterly wrong headed and ill informed Santorum is. First of all he calls Gloria Steinem a radicial feminist? Really? I can name quite a few more feminists that make Steinem look pretty "vanilla." I just find the "its the radical feminist, elite academia, and hollywood folks who are mistreating the stay home mother" pseudo-argument to be "unfounded" (I had a large man yell this at me when he saw the "well behaved women rarely make history" bumpersticker).

I want to focus on the abortion discussion:

STEPHANOPOULOS:Let me start out with something you wrote about abortion.You say, in the book, you say, in effect, talking about Roe v. Wade, you say it created a private license to kill a certain category of Americans, the unborn, and raised this license to a constitutional principle.So I guess if you were John Roberts up for the Supreme Court, the hearings would be pretty clear: You want to overturn Roe v. Wade.


SANTORUM: Well, what I’d like to do is have these kinds of incredibly important moral issues be decided by the American public, not by nine unelected, unaccountable judges.You know, what Judge Roberts talks about is a principle that we haven’t seen much lately, something called judi cial restraint.If you look at our checks and balances, really, the courts don’t really have any oversight over them. And so, throughout history, the courts have said, Look, we understand that we have potentially enormous power, and we’re going to restrain ourselves from exercising that power. I heard Judge Roberts say the other day that, you know, a baseball game would be a pretty sad game if the umpire was the most important player on the field.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, but you say you want…

SANTORUM: And the court is really supposed to be an umpire between the legislative branch and the executive branch. Instead, they’re trying to play the game.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you say you don’t want the courts to decide, you want the people to decide. And of course, if Roe v. Wade were overturned, each state would have the choice.But I wonder if that’s good enough, given what you believe. If you believe that that would essentially give the states a license to kill, don’t you have to be for a constitutional amendment that would ban abortions in every state?

SANTORUM: Well, OK, let’s just say, let’s say that we did that, that would be the democratic process. Again, it…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But do you support that?

SANTORUM: I would support a constitutional amendment, sure.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How come you’ve never co-sponsored one or introduced one in the Senate?

SANTORUM: Well, because we’re so far away from any potential of doing a constitutional amendment. The bottom line is, what we want is the people to speak on this issue.And I think the most logical way, given the state of play in the American mores, if you will, is having each state legislature, and the Congress potentially, although I would really try to reserve it to the state legislature, have them decide what the collective morality is.
This is an issue important enough for the people of America to make a decision, instead of having nine people take that moral judgment away from us as a people.

The entire transcript can be found here.

Where I get dizzy and some nose bleeds is when a fellow like Santorum, who "claims" to believe in absolute moral truths, wants to then let serious moral debates be discussed and worked out by the people.

I would ordinarly agree with this line of thought, since I think healthy debate with people that you agree with, disagree with, are frighted of, or find downright stupid is what makes a democracy thrive. By having public moral debates and, hopefully a good measure of civil discourse, we, as a collective body, may arrive at a better understanding of the issue. In the case of abortion, I think we might be able to reach a common ground with the "pro-lifers" if we could have real dialogues with them, and let them know that we are not pro-abortion. If they could come to understand that simple point, and really understand it, we would be having a better conversation. We would've made some progress.

And yet, when Santorum asks for a public debate about the morality of abortion, he "would really try to reserve it to the state legislature, have them decide what the collective morality is."

What exactly is the process whereby we will have decided what the collective morality is for our state on the matter of abortion? Will we sit in a room with each other for days on end until we finally--out of exhaustion or thuggery--have articulated the "common will." Is that even possible? And, moreover, if a state were to decide that abortion was not immoral and therefore made it legal as well as offereded state dollars to low income women to pay for an abortion, would Santorum agree with that "democratic" process. No, not really, he would get on board to pass an Amendment banning abortion.

Ok, let me sort some stuff out here:
(1) Santorum is an absolutist
(2) Santorum thinks we should arrive at or have representative bodies decide what our collective morality is

Doesn't (2) sound more like might makes right?

Which is it for Santorum? Perhaps he is an old-fashioned missionary. He wants to "convert" everyone to see the world the way he does in his book. And, he thinks this is likely to happen if you overturn Roe. See, there ain't no intimidating, political threatening, or party payback to judges. So, if you want to ensure your way, you make it a "democratic" (hence highly political process, involving all sorts of money, money, money that doesn't really represent what the people want.)

So, Perhaps what Santorum believes are not absolute truths that any other rational person will come to discover themselves, but rather that he has to get in there and use government to make us accept a common morality.

Good luck with that!