2012: We Need a Candidate with Courage, Convictions, Clarity and Conscience

I write to respond to a Guest Opinion piece we published by a friend, David Jones, who opined that we need a Thomas More Candidate who is courageous enough to speak out on the issues and positions we know matter the most.   My response is that I believe we have at least one and his name is Rick Santorum. He is a man of courage in an age of cowardice and is unafraid to address the issues that matter most.

WASHINGTON, D.C.  (Catholic Online) - First, the "full disclosure" statements as I put 'pen to paper', or more accurately, fingers to keyboard. I am writing this opinion piece without any clerical title associated with my name. I do not speak on behalf of the Church I love. I simply try, as do many others like me, to take the wisdom found in the body of moral theology referred to as the "Social Teaching" of that Church and inform my political participation according to its principles. I will not venture into the silly and cynical game prevalent in some circles which looks at candidates who actually stand for the issues which matter most and then purport to be unable to support them because allegedly "they can't win." That is a recipe for disaster - as our recent efforts in the political process have demonstrated so clearly. I write as a private citizen and not on behalf of Catholic Online which I serve as Editor-in-Chief. Catholic Online has not endorsed any candidate in this early part of the presidential campaign. However, Catholic Online is constituted as a for profit company for many reasons, one of which is to not be backed into a corner when political courage requires taking on folks in the public square who stand for positions which do not advance the common good. Finally, I write to respond to a Guest Opinion piece we published by a friend, David Jones, who opined that we need a Thomas More Candidate who is courageous enough to speak out on the issues and positions we know matter the most.   My response to my friend David is that I believe we have at least one and his name is Rick Santorum. David, perhaps you are not aware of Senator Santorum's clear and courageous positions on all of the issues you wrote about because he has not been given room to speak at these debates. After all, the die is cast in the eyes of the pundit class and media. They want this Republican Primary Race to come down to Governor Mitt Romney or Governor Rick Perry. I have reservations about both of them. Throughout my career, I have hung a picture of St. Thomas More, the patron of all politicians and public servants, in my office. As a human rights and constitutional lawyer, Thomas More has been my patron. He is an example of a faithful Catholic who always lived a unity of life and never compromised the truth. So, too, is Rick Santorum. He is a morally coherent Catholic who lives a unity of life. Many years ago when I first visited Senator Santorum's office on Capitol Hill, I saw the same painting of Thomas More on his wall. Over the years I have come to know him I have come to believe that he is a contemporary Thomas More; a man who exemplifies what we so desperately need in public service these days.  He remains faithful to his deeply held convictions.  He has a heart for those who have no voice.  He is dedicated to the true common good of all. We are living under what Pope Benedict XVI called a "Dictatorship of Relativism" in the West. The culture stumbles, drunken on the false notion of freedom as giving some people a "right" to kill the innocent, divorced from norms to guide the exercise of human choice and govern our behavior. When there is a wholesale effort to deny the existence of anything objectively true which can be known by all and form the basis of our common life, then there is no real freedom. Rick Santorum is a man of courage in an age of cowardice and is unafraid to address the issues that matter most. In 1947, C.S. Lewis addressed the decline of his beloved Britain in an insightful book entitled The Abolition of Man: How Education Develops Man's Sense of Morality. He warned of the subjective and relativist trends in the British educational system and reasserted the timeless moral truths of Christianity. Lewis called for a return to the classical Christian vision of the human person and the cultivation of virtues as the path to true human flourishing and freedom. He defined what he called "the chest" in this work as the "higher emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments or character." He wrote that without this "chest", men and women devolve into self idolatry losing their human dignity and true freedom. They become slaves to disordered appetites. The West is a mess as Lewis warned - and his words in that book are timely: "And all the time - such is the tragicomedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive,' or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity.' In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." In an age of political lightweights Rick Santorum is a heavyweight. He is a statesman in an age of salesmen - and women. He is a "man with a chest" and a man of honor. He knows that human rights - such as the Natural Law Right to Life - and human freedoms such as the freedom to be born - are goods of human persons. When there is no human person to exercise them all the rhetoric extolling them is nothing but empty air and sloganeering. The Pro-Life position is a response to the truth revealed by the Natural Law and confirmed by medical science. The child in the womb is an innocent human life and it is wrong to intentionally kill him or her through procured abortion. Santorum would never answer in response to a question concerning the Right to Life that choosing "strict constructionist" Judges is sufficient or that each State should handle the decision of whether they will protect the Right to life or allow children in the womb to be killed through procured abortion. Rights are endowed by a Creator upon human persons and not conferred by the State. This insight was enshrined by the American founders in the Declaration of Independence. Because rights are goods of the human person, we must defend the human persons who will exercise them. Our opposition to the judicial manufacture of an alleged "right" to take innocent human life in the womb must never take a back seat to any other concern in the public policy arena. Abortions have no rights, only human persons do and every procured abortion kills a human being and denies the right to life. Similarly, insistence upon defending the institution of marriage is also based upon the truth as revealed in the Natural Law which is written on every human heart and knowable through the exercise of reason. Marriage is a lifelong union between one man and one woman open to the bearing and rearing of children. This truth is accepted across cultures. 

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The effort to give an enforced legal equivalency to non-marital relations and force all of us to call what can never be a marriage to be a marriage - such as homosexual partnerships - or face the police power of the State, is unjust. It can never serve the true common good. The defense of marriage is a defense of the blueprint for a just, healthy and happy society where children's rights are also respected. Marriage - and the family founded upon it- is the first government, first hospital, first economy, first school, first mediating institution and the foundation of our life together as a truly free people. Santorum defends this truth in spite of the savage efforts by some within the fringe of the homosexual community to to load the search engine Google in such a way that this good man is subjected to reprehensible filth. 

Notice that Rick Santorum does not back down- and he won't back down. He does not compromise and would never answer in response to a question concerning marriage that each State should handle the issue of marriage in its own way. Along with solidarity, which confirms the truth that we truly are our brother/sister's keeper, we must always keep in mind the importance of the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is a social ordering principle which respects the proper role of the family and the mediating institutions as the first place where governing should occur. It is about much more than federalism and it certainly is not satisfied with a misguided "States Rights" approach to issues such as Life and marriage. 'States Rights' and Conservative Rhetoric are not enough. We need a candidate to emerge in this primary season who has courage, convictions, clarity and conscience. Hopefully the debate in Florida on Thursday will allow such candidates to actually speak. 

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