The French media is abuzz with the stunningly strong showing of the far right, more so even than the Socialist's victory in the first round of voting for France's president for the next 5 years. Marine Le Pen got more votes than her father who founded her party on resentment against immigrants and European immigration and nostalgia for past French greatness and unapologetic exceptionalism (sound familiar). She is a bit like a more articulate, far more intelligent, and in some ways more overtly right wing agitator than Sarah Palin. in other words she is far more dangerous To her credit though, unlike Palin she also represents the interests of workers hurt by la crise (as the French refer to the economic slowdown following the recession caused by American the mortgage-backed securities debacle under the Bush administration) and believes in a strong social safety net, just one for French only (non-native born need not apply particularly if they have funny names and "look Muslim" (how does one look like a religion? OK, it was Sarkozy who actually made the "looks Muslim" remark following the shootings in Toulouse but she has said similar things)). Her father once famously said that France was never so well-run as under the German occupation and that the Holocaust was not that great a tragedy in the grand scheme of things (it's actually illegal to say the latter in many Western European countries but he came close). I took this picture last week in France when the elections were in full swing.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
French elections : it is hard to believe this person got almost 20% of the French first round presidential votes...
The French media is abuzz with the stunningly strong showing of the far right, more so even than the Socialist's victory in the first round of voting for France's president for the next 5 years. Marine Le Pen got more votes than her father who founded her party on resentment against immigrants and European immigration and nostalgia for past French greatness and unapologetic exceptionalism (sound familiar). She is a bit like a more articulate, far more intelligent, and in some ways more overtly right wing agitator than Sarah Palin. in other words she is far more dangerous To her credit though, unlike Palin she also represents the interests of workers hurt by la crise (as the French refer to the economic slowdown following the recession caused by American the mortgage-backed securities debacle under the Bush administration) and believes in a strong social safety net, just one for French only (non-native born need not apply particularly if they have funny names and "look Muslim" (how does one look like a religion? OK, it was Sarkozy who actually made the "looks Muslim" remark following the shootings in Toulouse but she has said similar things)). Her father once famously said that France was never so well-run as under the German occupation and that the Holocaust was not that great a tragedy in the grand scheme of things (it's actually illegal to say the latter in many Western European countries but he came close). I took this picture last week in France when the elections were in full swing.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Great lecture series: History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon by Bart D. Ehrman
My review of History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon by Bart D. Ehrman, an outstanding lecture series from The Great Courses:
I listened to this lecture series on the drive to and from Barcelona, Spain, from Geneva, Switzerland, and from lecture one, I was hooked. Normally, I can only digest a couple lectures at a time while driving before my attention begins to wander, but Professor Ehrman gave such a humorous but excellent overview I kept listening.
I strongly disagree with reviewers who believed he was condescending either to Christianity (or to his students); I felt his comments simply reflect how widespread misconceptions are about the Bible and the astonishingly arbitrary way in which the New Testament was created. He repeatedly approached the subject with humility, emphasizing that he was a historian, not a theologian, and his job was not to pass judgment on the truth of the texts, only to describe how they were written, translated, propagated and accepted. Those who gave the course low ratings seemed to be rating it based on how it conformed to their theological ideas rather than whether it did what it was supposed to do: report the history of the writing and canonization of the New Testament.
I felt the reviewer who commented on the professor's personal religious beliefs both misrepresents the content of the lecture and injects a prejudice that I hope the Teaching Company does not share; since Jews do not believe that Jesus was divine, should Jewish professors be barred from studying this area of history? I certainly hope not.
If only Marxists could teach about Marx, psychoanalysts about Freud, or communists about Stalin, we would not have scholarly lectures but propaganda (itself a Christian term invented to propagate the faith (versus critically analyze it)).
I learned much from an Islam lecture series given by a non-Muslim ( Professor John L. Esposito, Ph.D., Temple University,
Georgetown University) and much about Judaism from Karen Armstrong, who is not Jewish, but who is recognized in Israel for her scholarship on Mediterranean Monotheism including Judaism. We can learn far more from Alexis de Tocqueville about American society because as a French citizen he saw it as an outsider, taking note of things those who had never left America might have been oblivious to.
I felt the reviewer who commented on the professor's personal religious beliefs both misrepresents the content of the lecture and injects a prejudice that I hope the Teaching Company does not share; since Jews do not believe that Jesus was divine, should Jewish professors be barred from studying this area of history? I certainly hope not.
If only Marxists could teach about Marx, psychoanalysts about Freud, or communists about Stalin, we would not have scholarly lectures but propaganda (itself a Christian term invented to propagate the faith (versus critically analyze it)).
I learned much from an Islam lecture series given by a non-Muslim ( Professor John L. Esposito, Ph.D., Temple University,
Georgetown University) and much about Judaism from Karen Armstrong, who is not Jewish, but who is recognized in Israel for her scholarship on Mediterranean Monotheism including Judaism. We can learn far more from Alexis de Tocqueville about American society because as a French citizen he saw it as an outsider, taking note of things those who had never left America might have been oblivious to.
Frankly, I do not trust people with strong a priori belief systems to be honest presenters of the data wherever those data may lead. At any rate, if something is true, our belief in it is immaterial as long as we are intellectually honest in how we present the consensus of scholarship and evidence. A 2010 survey showed that agnostics, Jews, and Mormons scored higher on a test of religious knowledge than those who considered themselves very religious, especially evangelical Christians.
This has certainly been my experience - anyone who says that every word of the Bible is perfect, timeless, and represents the direct word of god either has not read it or is oblivious to the extraordinary arbitrary way the collection of works we now call the Bible were created, translated, copied, and edited. The fact that a message was imperfectly copied or transmitted does not mean automatically that the message should be rejected as false, but anyone ignoring the enormous human fingerprints all over the Bible are simply not telling the truth.
If Professor Ehrman was critical of anyone it was fundamentalists, particularly those of the End Times variety who misunderstand the historical context and contemporary targets of Revelation (which many of them incorrectly pluralize). But how else can a scholar of this period respond to those who seem to believe that the New Testament was never altered, magically and directly flowing from the mouth of Jesus - as captured by his followers - into a hotel room near you? And why should a scholar not point out absurd misconceptions, even strongly held ones?
One is free to believe in one god, no god, or twenty, or choose whatever sacred texts to reinforce this belief system, but the rest of us are free not to and to examine those texts and ask how they were created. The passion with which a belief is held - and the offense some will take to us paying attention to the "man behind the curtain" - says nothing about its ultimate truth in an absolute sense.
My wish is that those who search for theology seek it in the appropriate forum but please let those of us who love history enjoy and learn from these courses. Giving a history course a low rating because it does not match your metaphysical preconceptions is not fair either to the lecturer or to other potential listeners who might be scared away by a low rating that does not reflect the true quality of the course.
If anything, I felt that Professor Ehrman was too kind to the centuries of anguish and bloodshed that the Christian obsession with orthodoxy (versus orthopraxy) unleashed. He did a good job of pointing out how strange monotheism and exclusivism were in the ancient world, but since all competing more tolerant polytheistic faiths were brutally crushed in the Mediterranean and Europe, we forget the radical nature of these beliefs - that god appeared once and only once to a specific people and time, was not recognized as such by his contemporaries who mostly rejected him, but that if we don't believe in him in just the right way 2,000 years later god will punish us forever and ever. Beliefs are ultimately involuntary (I can no more will or force myself to believe in Jesus anymore than I can force myself to believe in Allah or Zeus or Krishna) but clearly those exposed to the same texts either did not find them convincing or have now split into tens of thousands of Christian denominations, most of which do not recognize each other, and many of which have done their best to exterminate each other.
If someone launched a public education campaign with such contradictory documents written in such a manner that most people exposed to them are either not understanding them or erupting into savage battles over whose interpretation is correct - usually over the pettiest of metaphysical differences - then that public education campaign would be deemed a failure at best, a destabilizing and toxic influence at worst.
My only gripe about the course was that I would have liked to have more meat and less bread, meaning a bit more detailed analysis of exactly how the canon were selected and the others rejected. This came at the end of the series and seemed to go by so quickly I almost thought I missed it. The Council of Nicea, the influence of the Roman authorities who wanted to settle disputes such as the Arian "heresy" quickly for political expedience rather than any divine inspiration or scholarly reflection, and the fact that Jesus did not - despite what the lecturer implied - ever explicitly state he himself was a deity, were either glossed over or not mentioned, but perhaps this is the reason the lectures flowed as they did - they were relatively uncluttered. Also, the idea of a virgin birth was far from universally accepted, and the lecturer did not mention that early Christians took some liberty with language when translating the Hebrew word Åalma ("young woman") in chapter 7, verse 14, of Isaiah ("Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel") into the Greek word for virgin (parthenos).
If someone launched a public education campaign with such contradictory documents written in such a manner that most people exposed to them are either not understanding them or erupting into savage battles over whose interpretation is correct - usually over the pettiest of metaphysical differences - then that public education campaign would be deemed a failure at best, a destabilizing and toxic influence at worst.
My only gripe about the course was that I would have liked to have more meat and less bread, meaning a bit more detailed analysis of exactly how the canon were selected and the others rejected. This came at the end of the series and seemed to go by so quickly I almost thought I missed it. The Council of Nicea, the influence of the Roman authorities who wanted to settle disputes such as the Arian "heresy" quickly for political expedience rather than any divine inspiration or scholarly reflection, and the fact that Jesus did not - despite what the lecturer implied - ever explicitly state he himself was a deity, were either glossed over or not mentioned, but perhaps this is the reason the lectures flowed as they did - they were relatively uncluttered. Also, the idea of a virgin birth was far from universally accepted, and the lecturer did not mention that early Christians took some liberty with language when translating the Hebrew word Åalma ("young woman") in chapter 7, verse 14, of Isaiah ("Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel") into the Greek word for virgin (parthenos).
Professor Ehrman mentioned that the two genealogies of Christ differ from their starting point (one from David, the other from Adam) but perhaps out of kindness does not reflect that not a single name on the two lists is the same (except for David and Joseph of course). They cannot both be right.
He does point out something I had only learned recently, that the story of Christ forgiving the adulterer about to be stoned (as Biblical law demanded) had been inserted in the year 150 into a text that generations of early Christians read without that account. This of course does not mean that it did not happen only that those who originally wrote the texts did not feel it was important enough to put in or did not know about it if it did happen.
The idea of blood atonement, essentially having another innocent creature (or in the case of Jesus, a man) killed to offset some wickedness you might have engaged in is strange and frankly immoral to a modern audience (I am reminded of people who paid substitutes to take their place rather than fight themselves in the Civil War; legal at the time, but frowned upon today); Richard Dawkins makes an excellent case against this central theme of Christianity (and of sacrifice-based religions as most Mediterranean ones were), one that I had not even thought much about until it was presented in its starkest terms. (Like so many of the stranger aspects of Christianity, it is just there in the background culture so much that even those of us who were not indoctrinated as children can't help but ignore some of its more jarring tenets and claims.)
The idea of blood atonement, essentially having another innocent creature (or in the case of Jesus, a man) killed to offset some wickedness you might have engaged in is strange and frankly immoral to a modern audience (I am reminded of people who paid substitutes to take their place rather than fight themselves in the Civil War; legal at the time, but frowned upon today); Richard Dawkins makes an excellent case against this central theme of Christianity (and of sacrifice-based religions as most Mediterranean ones were), one that I had not even thought much about until it was presented in its starkest terms. (Like so many of the stranger aspects of Christianity, it is just there in the background culture so much that even those of us who were not indoctrinated as children can't help but ignore some of its more jarring tenets and claims.)
In other words, Professor Ehrman held his fire and if anything bent over backwards not to offend modern Christians who believe Jesus was divine (half of first century Christians didn't) or that the New Testament was the unaltered direct word of God meant to be read as an objective history (something those who wrote it and the audience for whom it was created would have found absurd). Given all the pain and anguish that rigid interpretation of these texts has caused, I think it is imperative that we all recognize that they were never meant to be taken literally and even metaphorically they are frequently contradictory if not troublesome. I cannot imagine that even those who believe these texts contain a great deal of truth would not be strengthened by critically examining them, and that is exactly what this lecture series could help them do. As another great teacher once said, let him who has ears listen.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Santorum and the Sexual Revolution - Excerpts from Charles Blow's Excellent New York Times columns
This was another great editorial by Charles M. Blow. I took the liberty of inserting my two cents' worth regarding Santorum's outrageous comments about women, gynecology, evolution, and homosexuality.
Santorum and the Sexual Revolution
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: March 2, 2012
...
Santorum seems to have an unhealthy fixation with, and passionate disdain for, the 1960s and the sexual freedoms that followed... It’s instructive to recall a speech and question-and-answer session he gave in 2008 to a course on religion and politics at the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life in Washington.... Santorum ventured off onto sex:
Next a commenter falsely claimed that my colleague Maureen Dowd “said that the Republican Party is trying to repeal Woodstock.” It was a misrepresentation of a 1998 column she had written about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. What she actually wrote was:
But let’s not let facts slow us down. Santorum, predictably, deflected back to sex:
While explaining what he saw as a shift in the Democratic Party away from “blue-collar working-class folks with traditional values” Santorum said:
The questions finally got around to asking about sex directly, much to Santorum’s delight, I’m sure. To one of those questions Santorum answered in part:
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.
In fact, Santorum’s distaste for the sexual revolution of the 1960s leaks over into a deep dislike of everything that the 1960s represents. Santorum continued in the question-and-answer session:
Maybe that’s why he has such a dyspeptic reaction to the 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy, in which he said that “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”
Santorum said that the speech made him want to throw up because it was an “an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960.”
Nothing could be more absurd. James Madison, “Father of the Constitution” and fourth president of the United States, wrote in 1822 that:
... The kind of conservatism that Santorum represents has been described as a war on women, but ... it’s [really] 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.
Endnotes (my response):
[1] I am not sure this is true; the last time I looked at these numbers, people in the lowest quintile by income tended to vote disproportionately Republican, as did many of those in the upper quintile; in terms of voters, those who tend to vote Republican 55:45 are in the middle socioeconomically, but when you get the very top 1% of 1%, they tend disproportionately to vote (and support with their unlimited corporate donations) Republican. What Santorum completely misses here is that education and income remain highly correlated, and as your educational level rises, you tend to vote Democrat more than Republican. The typical Republican voter has some college, but did not complete a 4-year-degree. But even this correlation is not fool-proof because those who did not complete college tend to vote Democratic even more strongly than those with doctorates. At any rate, Santorum seems to view this as a.) all about sex; or b.) all about money. He completely ignores the fact that he should find troubling that as people become more educated, they tend to find his worldview unpalatable. The impoverished (who disproportionately include people whose education was interrupted) have a different kind of direct experience with the sorts of social issues Santorum and his party tend to ignore or mock. I doubt very much a single mother who supports Head Start and nutritional assistance for her family is thinking all that much about "sex" or even abstract ideas of "freedom." She is thinking about not being hungry and maybe whether her child will have a better shot at completing school than she did.
[2] This point would make sense if an abortion were much more expensive than giving birth and raising a child. Of course it isn't; the medical costs and potential risks of childbirth are exponentially greater than those associated with an early abortion, where the vast majority of abortions occur. Santorum, who in other spheres believes in the wonderful wisdom of the free market's invisible hand to solve all problems, is almost socialist in his desire for the government to take an intrusive, anti-free-market stand. Morality aside, abortion is the ultimate free market solution: for a small up front investment, it eliminates a potential future liability to taxpayers Santorum tells us are already too burdened by social services he would like to slash (poverty is a huge predictor of abortion, and a disproportionate number of unintended pregnancies if carried to term would grow up in poverty). This is not an argument for it (contraception, used properly, which Santorum also opposes, is the Occam's razor in this Malthusian cycle), but Santorum is not arguing what is most economical, but what is most in line with what his church - for reasons having nothing to do with economics - teaches. He has to choose between which argument he will use, but he can't have it both ways. Empowering the government to force a woman to have a child she cannot afford or is not ready to raise means by definition that someone must pay for that child's education, nutrition, healthcare, shelter, etc. Yet Santorum is clearly on record as saying he opposes all of these things (to be fair, he does not want the government to be paying for these things, but since private charities and food kitchens are swamped, and no other entity has the resources and economy of scale to efficiently oversee or deliver these services, to cut off government funding for the poor is the economic and moral equivalent of cutting off funding for the poor, period). So it's a very strange and self-contradictory moral and economic view of the world he has that focuses exclusively on poor pregnant women during their period of gestation (post-natally, he is unconcerned, even hostile to the poor).
[3] I actually agreed with these first two statements until I realized he left out some critical words. What he apparently wanted to say was, "[Acknowledgement of the reality of extra-marital] sex is a means. [The teaching of] evolution is a means." I disagree with those statements, as amended. We have a duty to teach our children the truth. It is irresponsible to allow religious or other ideology to withhold or distort scientific data and consensus in science class. Perhaps on Sunday or in a religious history class, one could teach the opposition a minority of modern fundamentalists have with teaching these particular scientific topics, but to be fair, one should also include in such a course the long-term track record of the church when it has waded into the scientific arena, from teaching that men had fewer ribs than women (because Genesis said Adam's rib was used to created Eve) to teaching that the sun revolves around the earth. It's possible they were wrong then and right now, but their long-term track record is far from fallible, to put it kindly. I did not know that Santorum opposed geologists and paleontologists as much as he opposes physicians, women, and stem cell researchers. Opposition to the teaching of accurate earth science is no longer a Vatican position, by the way; this idiosyncratic deviation is peculiar to American protestant fundamentalists.
[4] I believe Santorum, like Rush Limbaugh last week when he called Sandra Fluke a "slut" for advocating for the right of all women to access a class of medications for whatever indication, is confusing cause and effect, smoke and fire. Individuals make individual sexual decisions. They always have and always will, sometimes with guidance from their church, but there is very little correlation between church affiliation and private sexual practice. Governments and insurance companies and health care providers must concern themselves with what people in a group really do versus what Santorum believes they individually should do. There is a huge difference obviously. It seems difficult for the Limbaughs and Santorums of the world to grasp, but individuals may think beyond their immediate interests and needs. Most morally developed adults understand that there is a huge difference between not making a choice for yourself (to smoke, to have sex, to have unprotected sex) and forcing all citizens all the time to make that same choice. One person's reasonable regulation (in gun control for example) might be another person's tyrannical government overreach. Furthermore, I might on principle support policies built to address behaviors that I personally think are bad, immoral, or even dangerous, since I am able to wrap my mind around the idea that failure to do so harms us all and does nothing to make the behavior less likely. Those who support needle exchange programs are neither heroin addicts nor advocates of IV drug use. Those who support safe, legal abortion or contraception access that makes abortion less likely are neither "pro abortion" nor "pro promiscuity" anymore than they are "pro unintended pregnancy."
[5] "Sex … is anti-American." Very strange, especially considering that if none of our ancestors or immigrants' ancestors had sex, there is no way we would have exponentially grown to 310 million people. Considering that his church bemoaned the "culture of death" that widespread use of contraception in Italy must mean (their population growth is negative), how much more of a "genocide" the population effects of a sexless America iterated generation-after-generation would create!
Santorum and the Sexual Revolution
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: March 2, 2012
...
Santorum seems to have an unhealthy fixation with, and passionate disdain for, the 1960s and the sexual freedoms that followed... It’s instructive to recall a speech and question-and-answer session he gave in 2008 to a course on religion and politics at the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life in Washington.... Santorum ventured off onto sex:
“It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all of the sexual freedoms you want [sic], you are a bad guy. And you’re dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s the most central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at.”
Next a commenter falsely claimed that my colleague Maureen Dowd “said that the Republican Party is trying to repeal Woodstock.” It was a misrepresentation of a 1998 column she had written about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. What she actually wrote was:
“Since Watergate, there has been a pendulum of partisan revenge. And, right now, Republicans want their payback for Watergate, for Bork, for Iran-contra, even for Woodstock. Like Kenneth Starr, the Republicans are attempting to repeal the 1960s.”
But let’s not let facts slow us down. Santorum, predictably, deflected back to sex:
“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.”
While explaining what he saw as a shift in the Democratic Party away from “blue-collar working-class folks with traditional values” Santorum said:
“What changed was the ’60s. What changed was sex. What changed was the social and cultural issues that have huge amounts of money because if you look — I haven’t seen numbers on this, but I’m sure it’s true — if you go socioeconomic scale, the higher the income, the more socially liberal you are. [1] The more you know you can buy your way out of the problems that sexual libertinism causes you. [2] You have an abortion, well, I have the money to take care of it. If I want to live an extravagant life and get diseases, I can. ... You can always take care of everything. If you have money, you can get away with things that if you’re poor you can’t.” [3]
The questions finally got around to asking about sex directly, much to Santorum’s delight, I’m sure. To one of those questions Santorum answered in part:
“Sex is a means. Evolution is a means.# And the aim is a secular world. It’s a, in my opinion, a hedonistic, self-focused world# that is, in my opinion, anti-American.” [4]
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.
In fact, Santorum’s distaste for the sexual revolution of the 1960s leaks over into a deep dislike of everything that the 1960s represents. Santorum continued in the question-and-answer session:
“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.”
Maybe that’s why he has such a dyspeptic reaction to the 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy, in which he said that “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”
Santorum said that the speech made him want to throw up because it was an “an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960.”
Nothing could be more absurd. James Madison, “Father of the Constitution” and fourth president of the United States, wrote in 1822 that:
“Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”
... The kind of conservatism that Santorum represents has been described as a war on women, but ... it’s [really] 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.
Endnotes (my response):
[1] I am not sure this is true; the last time I looked at these numbers, people in the lowest quintile by income tended to vote disproportionately Republican, as did many of those in the upper quintile; in terms of voters, those who tend to vote Republican 55:45 are in the middle socioeconomically, but when you get the very top 1% of 1%, they tend disproportionately to vote (and support with their unlimited corporate donations) Republican. What Santorum completely misses here is that education and income remain highly correlated, and as your educational level rises, you tend to vote Democrat more than Republican. The typical Republican voter has some college, but did not complete a 4-year-degree. But even this correlation is not fool-proof because those who did not complete college tend to vote Democratic even more strongly than those with doctorates. At any rate, Santorum seems to view this as a.) all about sex; or b.) all about money. He completely ignores the fact that he should find troubling that as people become more educated, they tend to find his worldview unpalatable. The impoverished (who disproportionately include people whose education was interrupted) have a different kind of direct experience with the sorts of social issues Santorum and his party tend to ignore or mock. I doubt very much a single mother who supports Head Start and nutritional assistance for her family is thinking all that much about "sex" or even abstract ideas of "freedom." She is thinking about not being hungry and maybe whether her child will have a better shot at completing school than she did.
[2] This point would make sense if an abortion were much more expensive than giving birth and raising a child. Of course it isn't; the medical costs and potential risks of childbirth are exponentially greater than those associated with an early abortion, where the vast majority of abortions occur. Santorum, who in other spheres believes in the wonderful wisdom of the free market's invisible hand to solve all problems, is almost socialist in his desire for the government to take an intrusive, anti-free-market stand. Morality aside, abortion is the ultimate free market solution: for a small up front investment, it eliminates a potential future liability to taxpayers Santorum tells us are already too burdened by social services he would like to slash (poverty is a huge predictor of abortion, and a disproportionate number of unintended pregnancies if carried to term would grow up in poverty). This is not an argument for it (contraception, used properly, which Santorum also opposes, is the Occam's razor in this Malthusian cycle), but Santorum is not arguing what is most economical, but what is most in line with what his church - for reasons having nothing to do with economics - teaches. He has to choose between which argument he will use, but he can't have it both ways. Empowering the government to force a woman to have a child she cannot afford or is not ready to raise means by definition that someone must pay for that child's education, nutrition, healthcare, shelter, etc. Yet Santorum is clearly on record as saying he opposes all of these things (to be fair, he does not want the government to be paying for these things, but since private charities and food kitchens are swamped, and no other entity has the resources and economy of scale to efficiently oversee or deliver these services, to cut off government funding for the poor is the economic and moral equivalent of cutting off funding for the poor, period). So it's a very strange and self-contradictory moral and economic view of the world he has that focuses exclusively on poor pregnant women during their period of gestation (post-natally, he is unconcerned, even hostile to the poor).
[3] I actually agreed with these first two statements until I realized he left out some critical words. What he apparently wanted to say was, "[Acknowledgement of the reality of extra-marital] sex is a means. [The teaching of] evolution is a means." I disagree with those statements, as amended. We have a duty to teach our children the truth. It is irresponsible to allow religious or other ideology to withhold or distort scientific data and consensus in science class. Perhaps on Sunday or in a religious history class, one could teach the opposition a minority of modern fundamentalists have with teaching these particular scientific topics, but to be fair, one should also include in such a course the long-term track record of the church when it has waded into the scientific arena, from teaching that men had fewer ribs than women (because Genesis said Adam's rib was used to created Eve) to teaching that the sun revolves around the earth. It's possible they were wrong then and right now, but their long-term track record is far from fallible, to put it kindly. I did not know that Santorum opposed geologists and paleontologists as much as he opposes physicians, women, and stem cell researchers. Opposition to the teaching of accurate earth science is no longer a Vatican position, by the way; this idiosyncratic deviation is peculiar to American protestant fundamentalists.
[4] I believe Santorum, like Rush Limbaugh last week when he called Sandra Fluke a "slut" for advocating for the right of all women to access a class of medications for whatever indication, is confusing cause and effect, smoke and fire. Individuals make individual sexual decisions. They always have and always will, sometimes with guidance from their church, but there is very little correlation between church affiliation and private sexual practice. Governments and insurance companies and health care providers must concern themselves with what people in a group really do versus what Santorum believes they individually should do. There is a huge difference obviously. It seems difficult for the Limbaughs and Santorums of the world to grasp, but individuals may think beyond their immediate interests and needs. Most morally developed adults understand that there is a huge difference between not making a choice for yourself (to smoke, to have sex, to have unprotected sex) and forcing all citizens all the time to make that same choice. One person's reasonable regulation (in gun control for example) might be another person's tyrannical government overreach. Furthermore, I might on principle support policies built to address behaviors that I personally think are bad, immoral, or even dangerous, since I am able to wrap my mind around the idea that failure to do so harms us all and does nothing to make the behavior less likely. Those who support needle exchange programs are neither heroin addicts nor advocates of IV drug use. Those who support safe, legal abortion or contraception access that makes abortion less likely are neither "pro abortion" nor "pro promiscuity" anymore than they are "pro unintended pregnancy."
[5] "Sex … is anti-American." Very strange, especially considering that if none of our ancestors or immigrants' ancestors had sex, there is no way we would have exponentially grown to 310 million people. Considering that his church bemoaned the "culture of death" that widespread use of contraception in Italy must mean (their population growth is negative), how much more of a "genocide" the population effects of a sexless America iterated generation-after-generation would create!
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