The paradox of Rick Santorum's conservative beliefs

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

Santorum's supporters denounce the government's religious interference, but it's their mantra that feels like oppression

Posted by Ana Marie Cox

Monday 20 February

I can't imagine that anyone on the Obama re-election team ever thought they'd be so lucky as to run against Rick Santorum; even now, one senses a kind of incredulous bemusement among when they are asked to respond to the former senator's more strident remarks.

They can rise above Santorum's social conservative mud-slinging without raising a sweat. Last Sunday, Robert Gibbs, an Obama campaign adviser, used Santorum's accusation that the president had a "phony theology" to plea for civility. We have to, Gibbs said, "get rid of this mindset in our politics that, if we disagree, we have to question character and faith," an assertion that appeals to a conviction that most Americans cling to more strongly than any religious affiliation: the right to be left alone.

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.

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