Thursday September 8, 2005

There’s a brilliant (and scary) article by Jonathan Rauch on the web site of Reason magazine about the recent book written by presumptive presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), most infamously known for stating that allowing gay marriage would create a slippery slope leading to legalized polygamy and bestiality. The book is titled It Takes A Family: Conservatism and the Common Good — and, the writer notes, this polemic seems to be the death knell of any pretense that the Republican Party wants limited government.

The following two paragraphs from Rauch’s piece sum up the central problem here:

“In Santorum’s view, freedom is not the same as liberty. Or, to put it differently, there are two kinds of freedom. One is ‘no-fault freedom,’ individual autonomy uncoupled from any larger purpose: ‘freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice.’ This, he says, is ‘the liberal definition of freedom,’ and it is the one that has taken over in the culture and been imposed on the country by the courts.

Quite different is ‘the conservative view of freedom,’ ‘the liberty our Founders understood.’ This is ‘freedom coupled with the responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self.’ True liberty is freedom in service of virtue — not ‘the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be’ or ‘the freedom to be left alone’ but ‘the freedom to attend to one’s duties — duties to God, to family, and to neighbors.’”

After noting Santorum’s assessment that “In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society” — a fairly dramatic assessment, since our founding documents are eternally obsessed with securing our rights as individuals, not as families or any other sort of groups — Rauch goes on to say:

“Santorum shows no interest in defining principled limits on political power. His first priority is to make government pro-family, not to make it small. He has no use for a constitutional (or, as far as one can tell, moral) right to privacy, which he regards as a ‘constitutional wrecking ball’ that has become inimical to the very principle of the common good. Ditto for the notions of government neutrality and free expression. He does not support a ban on contraception, but he thinks the government has every right to impose one. … A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, ‘individual development accounts,’ publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in ‘every school in America’ (his italics), and more. Lots more.”

If this guy — or anyone with a similar ideology — is the GOP nominee for president in 2008, I will never vote for a Republican ever again. Such a move would declare, once and for all, that the era of big government is now eternal. Make no mistake: Santorum, if elected to the Oval Office, would seek to bring about an omnipresent totalitarian state in America.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.