The Fact That I Despise Rick Santorum Doesn't Justify This

I think Rick Santorum is wrong — dangerously wrong — about almost everything. I think his ideas are authoritarian, reactionary, and deeply inhumane (to the point of being hateful), and I’m tempted to cheer anything that harms his ability to assert political or social power… but even so, I can’t help thinking this story, from Newsweek by way of The Daily Beast, is unfair, on several levels.

First, as eager as I am to catch Santorum out as a hypocrite, that he was (according to the details embedded in the text) less devout, and less committed to Catholic social doctrine, as a young man than he is now doesn’t automatically make him one, anymore than the fact that I voted for Reagan as a callow youth makes my current commitment to liberalism hypocritical. People change their minds, particularly over the span of decades, and there’s nothing wrong with, nor intellectually dishonest about, that. In general, the ability to modify one’s ideas and beliefs over time is a good thing… though it’s unfortunate (to put it mildly) that Santorum has apparently been busily changing his mind in the wrong direction.

But this story goes much further, into the realm of guilthypocrisy by association… by double association, actually: It seems that when Santorum’s wife Karen was a young, single woman, she dated a doctor who, among other things, provided abortions. Really? The fact that a politician’s wife’s ex-boyfriend from decades past had an occupation the politician now vehemently opposes is supposed to add something to the current debate? It’s sufficient that Santorum’s positions on reproductive rights are dangerous and hateful; who his wife used to sleep with is immaterial to the debate.

Ahh, who she used to sleep with; there’s the rub. Because even beyond the issue of hypocrisy by association, this story is troubling on a much deeper level: It’s red-letter slut shaming.

Even if you thought the old boyfriend’s abortion history was relevant to current politics, why would we need to know that this was a case of a young nursing student not just dating, but living with a much older doctor? Why add the vague whiff of symbolic incest by mentioning that he had actually delivered her as a baby? Why repeat his (likely self-congratulatory) memory that she came on to him, inventing (as he imagined it) a fear of the dark in order to move herself from a chaste basement apartment to his bedroom? Would any of this have been a story worth telling if it were the much-less-titillating tale of going on a couple dates with an obstetrician near her own age whom she met at school?

None of these details has a single thing to do with evaluating or criticizing Santorum’s stand on abortion; they have everything to do with the smug glee of tagging a sanctimonious moralist with a “slutty” wife. Much as I like to see sanctimonious moralists tagged as sexual hypocrites, this is unfair to him, and viciously unfair to his wife. Worse, shaming Karen Santorum for her past sexual activity partakes of the very same obsessive sexism and sex-negativity that is at the root of what’s hateful and awful about her husband’s politics, and that haunts our society.

We can’t fight this shit — and we must fight it — by indulging in it ourselves.