On April 10, Rick Santorum dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. This was a sad day for politics. Let me explain:
I find Santorum’s social policies odious in the extreme. I feel that his crusade against abortion and contraception represented, whether he viewed it this way or not, an attack against women’s rights. Which are, in fact, human rights.
The same can be said of Santorum’s crusade against gay marriage, because marriage brings with it many civil rights that are often inaccessible to couples via other means. Additionally, Santorum referred to colleges as “indoctrination mills” and refuted the existence of global warming—a phenomenon that national science academies of all major industrialized nations agree exists.
Santorum is Catholic. This fact is not inherently negative, but the fact that he intended to bring his Catholicism into government could have been. He disagreed with the separation of church and state and did not want to hold his religious life apart from his public life.
From all this, it would not be hard to label Santorum as an anti-intellectual and religious fanatic. But that’s not the point.
Santorum was honest.
That is the point.
Everyone with more than a smidgen of cynicism in their outlook has mocked the supposed oxymoron of “honest politician” before, but the fact remains: Santorum spoke candidly, even when it led to widespread disagreement and ridicule.
Why did he disagree with the separation of church and state? Because the church informed his morals, morals that he felt compelled to act on as a part of the state. Were he a less devout man, or a less principled one, he could have let the matter drop and quietly reconciled his faith and his politics. But he did not.
His ideas may not have been pretty, nice, socially correct or even beneficial to the human race in any way whatsoever, but they were genuinely his.
Contrast this with Mitt Romney, who has been roundly criticized for his fluid stances on abortion and Afghanistan. His principles seem to belong to his constituents, or to whichever crowd he is working.
Yet Romney is winning the Republican primary. Go figure. It is almost as if an electoral system that depends on appealing to a very wide spectrum of voters inherently disadvantages the principled and honest entrants.
No wonder “honest politician” is an oxymoron.