The Obfuscation Report

From http://www.buzzflash.com/

Here is a very long, thoughtful, fact-filled, reality-based, historically, sociologically, psychologically and anthropologically accurate treatise that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is a complete fucking idiot.

enjoy... ~somadude


August 2, 2005

Rick Santorum Flunks "The History of the American Family"

By Walter C. Uhler

Readers of Senator Rick Santorum's book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, should examine it closely, including its concluding "Bibliographical Note." Then they should ask themselves: "Is there any evidence in the text or bibliographical note to suggest that Mr. Santorum has ever read a serious, comprehensive history of the American Family?"

This reviewer found no evidence whatsoever. Yet lack of comprehensive knowledge doesn't prevent Mr. Santorum from pontificating about the current crisis of the American family by sketching "the past forty years of American history in light of our founders' vision." [Santorum, p. xi] Yet, even if one assumes that Mr. Santorum has mastered both the past forty years and the founder's vision (which he hasn't), there's still early Colonial history and some 185 years of American family life after the American Revolution that he ignores.

Knowing little about the history of the American family, Santorum stuffs the gaping holes with bogus nostalgia and right-wing extremist ideology. Yet, does he really believe that Pennsylvania's intelligent voters will swallow such generic assertions as: "The village elders dislike the traditional family because of what it instills in children and society—traditional values." [p. 17] Such prattle befits an imbecile!

Even the dullest of Santorum's fellow conservatives might want to ask: (1) "Can you identify those terrible village elders?" (2) "Specifically, what do you mean by 'traditional family' and when did it come into existence?" and (3) "To which traditional values are you alluding?"

Yet, except for a feeble attempt to identify and describe traditional values—and a very poor treatment of "virtue"—the reader will not find specific and complete answers to these questions in Santorum's book. But, he's undeterred by such lack of precision. Thus, Santorum asserts: "I will argue that the unit that most efficiently, effectively, and naturally builds and replenishes capital in every aspect of society is the family." [p. 9]

Santorum's con begins with his book's title: It Takes a Family. For he does not mean just any family. His definition of "family" frowns on single parents, wouldn't contain cohabiting parents and most definitely cannot abide same sex parents.

No, Mr. Santorum's family is the "traditional" family "consisting of a mother and father who have committed themselves to each other in lifelong marriage together with their children." [p. 28] But there's more. In Santorum's "traditional" family, "men and women and children have natures," especially gender, which are unchanging and delimiting. "Nature is nature, and the freedom to choose against the natural law is not really freedom at all." [p.29]

Yet, slippery Santorum doesn't specify when this "traditional" American family came into existence. And although he attempts to link it to our Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, his religious beliefs about fixed "natures" expose him as an ideologue and charlatan.

After all, anyone familiar with the history of the American family knows that society in early Colonial America looked upon the "natures" of its members quite differently than did society after the American Revolution.

Had he read, for example, the book by Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of the Family, Santorum would know that, in seventeenth century Colonial America, marriage was primarily a business arrangement that required parental approval. It seldom originated from love. The family was an agricultural work unit in which the father dominated. Children were thought to be sinful and depraved by nature. After the age of two, it was the father's responsibility to break the willfulness of his children.

And lest parents become too soft in the course of raising them, children in their early teens were sent to live and work for other families. Finally, remarriage after the death of a spouse might result in the "fostering out" of all children from an earlier marriage. [Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life, pp. 13-16]

Marriage and family scholar, Stephanie Coontz, believes that the seventeenth century American family was traditional, when compared with European families of earlier centuries. But is this the "traditional" family and are these the "natures" that Mr. Santorum had in mind? Although he never specifies, I suspect not.

By the late eighteenth century, as economic changes undermined the leverage of fathers, marriage became more intimate and children "were increasingly viewed as special creatures with unique needs." [Mintz and Kellogg, p. 21] Less a place of work than in the seventeenth century, the home became a place of privacy and shelter from the competitive economic pressures of the outside world.

By the early nineteenth century, child-rearing manuals ceased being directed at fathers. And women—who until the mid-eighteenth century were widely viewed to be devious, sexually voracious, overly emotional and physically and intellectually inferior (by nature) —came to be seen "as inherently more virtuous and less selfish than men." [Ibid. p. 55] Thus, they were seen as better equipped by nature to provide the nurturing that children now required by nature. Perhaps this was the "traditional" family and "natures" to which Mr. Santorum alluded.

According to Ms. Coontz, writing in her new book, Marriage: A History, "in the eighteenth century people began to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners on the basis of love." [Coontz, p. 5]

But notice the immediate impact on Coontz's "traditional" family: "No sooner had the ideal of the love match and lifelong intimacy taken hold than people began to demand the right to divorce. No sooner did people agree that families should serve children's need than they began to find the legal penalties for illegitimacy inhumane. Some people demanded equal rights for women so they could survive economically without having to enter into loveless marriages. Others even argued for the decriminalization of homosexual love, on the ground that people should be free to follow their hearts." [Coontz, p. 8]

As Ms. Coontz goes on to explain, "there was a crisis over these questions in the 1790s [when the Founding Fathers still held sway], and another in the 1890's, and yet another in the 1920s," [Coontz, p. 8] before "things fell apart in the 1970s." [Ibid]

Santorum's book is silent about these earlier crises. Which allows him to demagogically blame anonymous liberal "village elders" (presumably still living) occupying the equally anonymous "Bigs," (big institutions attempting to control our lives) for the current crisis. Like an ignorant child (or an Ann Coulter), Santorum blames liberals for "trying to build bureaucracies to aid the poor and marginal in our society, while ignoring the central importance of families." [Santorum, p. 27]

Santorum's ignorance of the full history of the American family also serves his demagogy when he contrasts today's "toxic combination of the village elders' war on the traditional family and radical feminism's misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect," [p. 95] with an "America in previous generations" that was "rich in social, cultural, and moral capital" and supported and nurtured families. [p. 27] But, given the earlier crises, we know Santorum is dead wrong.

After all, as Ms Coontz explains, "the real question…is not why things fell apart in the 1970s but why they didn't fall apart in the 1790s, or in the next crisis of the 1890s, or in the turmoil of the 1920s, when practically every contemporary observer worried that marriage was 'on the rocks.' And the answer is not that people were better partners in the past or better able to balance the search for individual self-fulfillment and the need for stability. The reason is that for the most part they could not yet afford to act on their aspirations for love and personal fulfillment." [Coontz, pp. 8-9]

Readers of Charles E. Lindblom's extraordinary book, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (Yale, 1990) would recognize Santorum's game. Lindblom's concern was individual "impairment"—much of it resulting from the pursuit of narrow, job-related knowledge—and how it prevents Americans from solving the country's social problems. He succinctly captures such impairment with a quote from the renowned physicist Leo Szilard: Americans "were free to say what they think, because they did not think what they were not free to say." [Lindblom, p. 63]

According to Lindblom: "The whole history of humankind reads in some large part as a history of impairment of inquiry: ignorance, superstition, barriers to inquiry, exile and execution of dissenters, the many intimidations of tyranny, illiteracy, the steady impositions of peer pressure, and the use of the media for propaganda, among mass manifestations. This undeniable point invalidates the careless claim that contemporary attitudes, beliefs, values and volitions are on the whole a rational product of a winnowing out process through which, over millennia and centuries, humankind comes to know what is true and valid." [p. 69]

Senator Santorum traffics in such ignorance and superstition, yet possesses the certainty and petulance of Jose Ortega y Gasset's "learned ignoramus." Thus, Santorum assures us that intellectual formation "is all about conforming our minds to the truth." [p. 388]

Forget for the moment that Santorum's "truth" includes "faith" in the virgin birth (ignoring that the Hebrew word "almah" [young girl] was mistranslated as the Greek word "parthenos" [virgin] in the Septuagint) and spiritual leadership by an infallible Pope. Has it never occurred to him that Albert Einstein never would have arrived at E=MC², had he "conformed" his mind to the scientific "truth" as it was commonly understood at the time?

It didn't occur to him, because Santorum is an intellectual thug who allows his religious faith and political ideology to create and order his facts and conclusions. For example, Santorum claims "morality…derives from the objective reality that lies at the very heart of being human." [p. 392] Yet, in his "objective reality," abortion is immoral and merits some thirty pages of the book's attention [pp. 239-268], but the occupation of Iraq and the killing of Iraqis merely constitute the bringing of "order" to freedom there—and, thus, merit just one sentence. [p. 202]

Neither do corporate greed, corporate welfare nor tax cuts for the rich merit much attention in Santorum's morality based upon objective reality. Thus, neither Enron nor Halliburton merit a word of scorn. Yet Santorum waxes indignant about the welfare programs, which liberals supposedly foisted upon America's poor and needy. Consequently, Santorum's "morality based upon objective reality" has no credibility. Yet, he seeks to impose it upon you as conservative America's "common good."

Finally, Santorum's extremism borders on the dishonest when he asserts, "the courts have slowly strangled religious freedom." [p. 108] And is it really true that college professors are much more liberal than America's general population because "tenured radicals" from the 60s now fill so many departments. Or are professors more liberal because they read more serious books?

More significantly, isn't it just a bit disingenuous, if not dishonest, to write a book titled, It Takes a Family, but totally ignore the devastating impact on American families caused by the "creative destruction" of unbridled capitalism?

Is it merely an accident that Santorum's readers will never learn, for example, the warnings contained in the 1880 Census: "The factory system necessitates the employment of women and children to an injurious extent, and consequently its tendency is to destroy family life and ties and domestic habits, and ultimately the home." [Mintz and Kellogg, p. 85] Or is patent intellectual dishonesty at work?

Unfortunately, the best one can say about Senator Rick Santorum's terrible book is this: "Not every assertion within its pages is wrong and few of his many errors merit the contempt he richly deserved and received for linking "liberal" Boston to child molestation by Catholic priests." In a word, the book is slick Rick the ideologue, not sick Rick the ideologue.



Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).

waltuhler@aol.com