The paradox of Rick Santorum's conservative beliefs

[malaise]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ana-marie-cox-blog/2012/feb/20/rick-santorum-conservative-beliefs-paradox
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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.

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.