SANTORUM, AGAIN

In the interests of, I dunno, wasting a few pixels and getting the JYB delinked from the entire blogosphere, I've decided to let you peek in on my thought process regarding the Santorum deal just a little. So here goes, just a little stream of consciousness rant. Feel free to hit that little X in the upper right at any time.

The Santorum deal is a tempest in a teapot, much ado about a little, insert cliche here. It's about a law that's almost never enforced, that dates from a time when the common view of morality differed radically from today's view. In some ways that's good--the sodomy laws probably date from a time when slavery was legal and acceptable in Texas, for instance. In some ways that's bad--the sodomy laws date from a time when we didn't get divorced at the drop of a hat and didn't call our president "Hitler" when we disagreed with him. But that's where the law comes from. We're debating it now, not because of some burning need or rising social tide, but probably because somebody decided to challenge it or because some cop got overzealous. I don't know, don't care, doesn't really matter. It was passed when Democrats ruled the South, when Jim Crow separated the races, and when men donned hoods and strung up blacks. It was passed when lots of terrible things were going on, but also when a few good things were going on. The family wasn't under seige, mainline churches didn't get compared to terrorist-creating mosques, and everybody wore hats. So what am I saying? I don't know, this is a stream of consciousness thing, remember? For the record, the sentence about Democrats ruling the South denotes things I find detestable, including but not limited to Democrats ruling the South, which they did when that law was passed and when the other things mentioned in said sentence happened. In case anyone couldn't figure that out.

The Santorum deal has me steamed because it proves that Republicans haven't yet figured out how to make their points in ways that don't draw fire from everyone in the center and left, uniting them against us. It also proves we can't win big without immediately squandering that win on something trivial. Yes, trivial. The whole thing is trivial. Win the war, drag your party down because you let some AP hack trap you. Santorum may have ruined his political career over a law that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't matter much. It's hardly enforced, and doesn't stop anyone from doing anything. It's just there, like laws about buggy whips and Helen Thomas. It's not really worth the political capital being invested to save it, for the simple reason that it has zero effect on behavior and because it's utterly unenforcable. Unless you really do want police in every bedroom, which no one does.

But the piling on, the pack mentality, is an annoying feature of modern life. We all think we have to get out in front of the issue, never taking the time to just take a step back and look at it from a couple of angles. We bloggers exist because we despise and distrust the media, yet we take the media's take on Santorum verbatim without even thinking about it. We fight idiotarians, yet side with them if we think it's electorally expedient--never mind fairness. It's Packwood redux--letting one of our guys get squashed for doing something their guy is doing with impunity. Santorum never equated homosexuality with any other practice. He never advocated putting cops in bedrooms. He said something debatable, but hardly as damaging as the average utterance of Bill Clinton. That guy said we were about to invade North Korea the other day, on the eve of sensitive talks to end that country's nuclear program. That kind of talk gets people killed. Santorum's kind of talk gets people--what, mad? Ready to vote against him? Ready to picket the Supreme Court? Who cares?

If you don't like what the guy said, vote him out. Move to Pennsylvania if you have to. But don't come crying to me when you've sacrificed everything over some anti-gay slur that the Senator didn't even actually say.

UPDATE: Joshua Clayborn quotes me. Maybe I should just let the rants fly more often.
*I edited the Update because the original, self-deprecating remark didn't make much sense.

UPDATE AGAIN: Welcome to the deluge coming in from InstaPundit. I obviously need to just rant and rave more often. Anyhow, Glenn likes the Helen Thomas line but takes issue with my comment that no one actually wants to police bedrooms. I suppose there might be people out there who do in fact want to police bedrooms, though I haven't heard from any. I've mostly had people quite respectfully disagree with my defense of Santorum's right to make essentially the same legal argument proffered by the state of Texas, and which not incidentally seems to have found some agreement with the gay man's defense attorney, the very attorney challenging the law in the first place. Agree or disagree with Santorum's defense of sodomy laws (and I haven't made up my own mind on the subject yet), surely a senator has the right to offer comment on a case that's currently before the Supreme Court. I find the Human Rights Campaign's attempt to silence and intimidate him to be more disturbing than anything he actually said, mostly because what he actually said is just mainstream Catholic teaching (said the Southern Baptist...)

If any of you bedroom-policers are reading this, you're morons. Take it from a mouth-breathing right-winger who goes to church most Sundays and who opposes most of the larger gay rights agenda (the Heather Has Two Mommies kind of stuff) whether sodomy laws stand or fall, you're morons if you really want the police to enforce those sodomy laws. Slippery slopes can run the other way, folks. If you start enforcing one kind of bedroom law, pretty soon you're enforcing a lot more of them, and pretty soon you have little or no right to privacy in your own home. No one with any sense wants that. I don't even like it when the cops devote their scarce resources to setting up speed traps when they have bigger criminal fish to fry. Let's keep 'em out of our homes, if for no other reason (and there are lots of other reasons) than the sheer idiocy of policing buggery when dope dealers and murderers roam the streets. Said the son of a former arson investigator who's now a justice of the peace....