Blasting Boston: Santorum blames liberalism (again)
Not surprisingly as he faces re-election next year, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is getting some stinging criticism for the content of an op-end piece he penned in 2003, one in which the conservative Republican said blamed liberal Massachusetts for the burgeoning sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. Wrote your state’s junior senator: “Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When a culture is sick, every element in it becomes affected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”
Pandering has no better friend than Santorum, whose scribblings for Catholic Online have resulted in the Massachusetts congressional delegation clamoring for an apology, and have drawn a sharp rebuke from U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), who launched a rare personal attack against Santorum and his “Boston bashing” from the Senate floor.
Santorum should have expected this, especially with Democrats planning to saddle up popular state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr., in their starting gate for next fall’s Senate horse race.
Like so many other conservatives, Santorum trots out liberalism as a whipping boy for all manner of social, economic and cultural ills. And why not? Doing so has worked for conservatives for 25 years now, since the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1979. They’ve also scapegoated Hollywood in this manner, focusing on the nation’s movie-making capital as a source of moral and ethical decay – except when the GOP plucked Arnold Schwarzenegger, filmdom’s king of gratuitous violence, as a California gubernatorial candidate.
The last time we checked, Pennsylvania had racked up its fair share of priest participants in the church’s sex abuse scandal, which has unfurled and affected many dioceses across the nation. To what does Santorum attribute the Keystone State cases? Liberalism exported from Boston? Had Kennedy or any other senator made similar blanket statements attributing some societal perversion to the culture of Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, we can easily see Santorum at the press conference pulpit, deriding the act as one of high impropriety.
Santorum can no more pin the activities of a minority of Roman Catholic priests on the culture of Massachusetts in general, or Boston in particular, than he could blame a certain state for starting the nation’s illegal drug problem, or another for promoting promiscuity that leads to unwanted pregnancies or venereal disease. The truth is none of those problems – including the church scandals – has a geographic birthplace.
The implied thesis of Santorum’s comments, of course, is that Boston thinking and behavior, in places like big, bad Harvard University, are the root cause of what ails the nation. That’s patently untrue, and this rock-throwing is especially disturbing coming from a man whose own ethical behavior includes billing the Penn Hills School District for cyber-school training his own children received while living in Virginia. This is also the same Rick Santorum who, when running for the U.S. House, derided the incumbent Democrat for living in Virginia instead of in his own congressional district, something that now appears perfectly logical to Santorum.
Instead of searching for a boogeyman in Boston to blame for a problem, Santorum should be focused on problem solving for the entire United States. That’s why he was sent to Washington, D.C.