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.
So begins the powerful and insightful column in today's
New York Times by Charles M. Blow, titled as this post,
Santorum and the Sexual Revolution. Blow focuses on remarks on that the former Senator made in 2008 to a course in religion and politics at the
Oxford Centre For Religion & Public Life. That website does not provide any information at the "About Us" tab, but on the home page, under "Welcome" we read the following:
THE OXFORD CENTRE exists to equip public intellectuals, analysts and professionals to recognize and value the contributions of religion to public life.
Blow examines in particular Santorum's responses to questions after he made his opening remarks, and provides a link so that you can read them all. Perhaps one example might illustrate the "thinking" of this man who seeks to be our president:
“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.”
Please keep reading.
Blow is able to place Santorum's words in a proper context, one well worth considering:
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.
Besides quoting Santorum, Blow takes apart his rationalization for his remarks. For example, when Santorum argues that Kennedy's famous speech on separation of church and state “an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960" Blow responds with words of James Madison from 1822 that "religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”
Blow's penultimate paragraph reads as follows:
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.
And yes, there you can hear the voice his primary funder, Foster Friess, speaking to Andrea Mitchell.
But this about more than sex itself. Sex represents, as it does for many conservatives, a threat to their world view, a world view that places a group of men at the top of the power pyramid, in home and in society. Let me offer Blow's final paragraph before adding a few words of my own:
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 am in my 66th year. Our family was something of an anomaly, because my mother held an important professional position while I was in secondary school as an Assistant Attorney General of New York State, one who regularly argued - and always won - cases before the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. Around me, even though they may have limited the size of their families, other well-educated and gifted women were limited in the roles they could play outside of the home. Few women went to law school (now a majority of law students are female), even fewer went to medical school, and most of those were limitied to pediatrics and female health issues (and even in those fields they were (a) rare, and (b) considered less important than their male colleagues.
At the same time, Afircan-Americans were struggling for basic rights - a decent education, access to decent housing, the simple right to register to vote anywhere in the country. Other minority groups such as Hispanics, Native-Americans and Asians hardly entered the consciousness of most Americans. The idea of someone being openly gay was abhorrent to most of society.
The Warren Court began to change some of the rules. The willingness of some people to stand up for basic rights also changed the structure for society. People like Santorum reject those changes, and want to role back the clock - on sexual matters to be sure, but on all kinds of other personal liberties, on the very idea of equality of person regardless of color of skin, marital status, gender, or sexual orientation.
Insofar as they can find things wrong with American society, they want to blame those "wrongs" upon the changes flowing from the 60s, rather than the problems caused by those opposing equality, especially economic, political and social equality. Somehow they seem to think an earlier time was idyllic. In this Santorum ignores his own family history - the grandfather to whom he used to refer regularly (and had he continued his focus on that and kept hidden some of his extreme social views he might well have already locked up the nomination) was a communist and someone very pro-union, because of his experiences first in Italy then in this country after he crossed the ocean. Santorum's relatives who remained in Italy are still very leftist, precisely because they have experienced what a "Christian" dominated right-wing government and society means.
The pill represents an important threshold. Prior to the pill women had little power over their reproductive systems on their own. Oh to be certain, things like sponges soaked in vinegar were not completely unknown. And yes, post-Griswold women could use diaphragms. But what woman walked around with her diaphragm already in? A man could quickly put on a condom ("sold for prevention of disease only") or choose to withdraw before ejaculation. The pill enabled a woman to be liberated sexually in a way previously available only to men.
I suspect some not fully developed men have trouble with the idea that the woman has the final say on whether to bear his child - whether through birth control or termination of the pregnancy. After all, there is a clear male tendency seen in other animals of wanting their progeny to survive and flourish but not the progeny of competitor males. Perhaps some of what we see in the economic warfare of the rich against the rest of us is also part of this - that is why so many insist on passing on accumulated wealth to future generations without taxation.
The likes of Limbaugh with "feminazis" illustrates something that is hardly new - men are threatened by the power of women when they control their own sexuality. That may be why in some societies women who exercise religious leadership and medical knowledge (including of the reproductive cycle) are often accused of witchcraft.
Some men have always recognized the power women have if they have control of their sexuality. One need to little than read (or see a production of) Lysistrat to understand that. That comedy reminds us that women's control of sexuality is a force that can be strong enough to take away from men their ultimate power, derived from their greater physical strength, the power to make war. It is why war is often accompanied by raping the women of the opposing side - and remember, part of the founding myth of Rome is the rape of the Sabine women. It may underlie the visceral opposition by some men to women in combat, for if a woman can demonstrate equal ferocity with the men, their strength offset by the power of weapons, some men become very insecure, unsure of their role and place in the world.
Fully developed men are not threatened by women who are empowered. Fully developed whites are not threatened by people of color in positions of power and authority. Fully developed heterosexuals do not fear things like marriage equality and gay adoption - love is not restricted to those of rigid male-dominated religious and family structures.
Blow's column is titled "Santorum and the Sexual Revolution." Although Santorum's attitude is very much opposed to much of modern society, I think that title is appropriate, because after all sexual freedom scares people like Santorum.
One can choose to be totally monogamous. One can choose to avoid sex outside of marriage. One can choose to use sex primarily for procreative purposes. The sexual revolution does not close that choice. Santorum and people like him, however, wish to impose their views on the rest of us, and if they could do so sexually, they would also do so in matters of economics, of economic and political equality.
In the long term, if we remain a democratic republic, that point of view will fail. I have enough contact with young people to understand this. I remind people of the young lady several years ago whose father was a prominent African-American minister of the "God made them Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" orientation, who said of gay marriage that she did not understand the opposition to gay marriage, weren't her gay classmates as entitled as she was to the pursuit of happiness? I have students with two mothers. I have openly gay students who are close friends with people from fundamentalist backgrounds. The rainbow hues of my classes make clear that ideas of racial purity are long since obsolete for increasing numbers of our future leaders.
But there is no doubt that some, like Santorum, very much want to use an attack on sexual liberty as the starting point. And do not doubt this - it is not just Roe v Wade that is under attack, but also Griswold v Connecticut: they want to roll back decades of societal changes that threatens their world view and their possibility of control.
Allow me to quote one more answer from Santorum, as offered by Blow:
“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.”
He thinks it is
absolutely incorrectly but Santorum is absolutely correct. The sexual revolution and civil rights are inextricably bound together in how this nation has advanced as a place of greater liberty for ALL. We should not forget it.
Read the Blow.
Pass it on.
It is that important.
Peace.