Earlier today at the Values Voters Summit, Buzzfeed reported the following about Rick Santorum:
“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country,” Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”
He’s come in for some ridicule on this, but I think most people who are mocking Santorum just don’t understand who Santorum was talking to or what he was actually saying. They don’t speak fundamentalist or social conservative.
I do—or at least I used to—so I’m going to translate.
Fundamentalists, especially the sort who go to the Values Voters Summit, use smart as an epithet. They do this because they don’t value classical education. In fact, they see it as a threat to their way of life. These are the people who have been at the forefront of the home school movement, who have pushed for first creationism and then intelligent design in science curricula, who have started and supported universities like Liberty and Patrick Henry and Regent as a way to push back against the secular world. When Rick Santorum says “we will never have the elite, smart people on our side,” he’s using smart as a synonym for liberal, for secular, for people who will accept objective science over the Bible.
Notice how he tied “elite” to “smart”? That’s a sign Santorum is using it as a slur. Santorum likes to play the role of the common man, and wants to speak to his audience as if that’s what they are: salt of the earth, God’s children. You know who’s elite? Liberals. You know who’s “smart”? Liberals.
But they’re not smart in God’s ways. They’re not smart in the only ways that matter. Santorum doesn’t have to say this out loud because this attitude is a basic tenet of social conservatism and Christian fundamentalism. His audience is elite and smart in the ways that matter—they’re just not “the elite, smart people.” And they wear that distinction like a medal. Santorum didn’t make a gaffe here—he was talking to his people, and they knew exactly what he was saying.
I’ve been seeing these billboards around town a bit more often lately. Set aside the nonsense that there’s a fetal heartbeat 18 days after conception for a moment—that’s just another example of the idea that Jesus apparently said it’s okay to lie if you’re doing good works. What I’m more interested in is who’s missing from the ad.
Baby is there, and given the headband with flowers, I’m guessing it’s a girl, and what is she saying? “Daddy says I’m a gift.” How precious.
Daddy is there, baby is there. No mommy.
This isn’t a mistake. Anti-choice activists spend a lot of time trying to erase women from the discussion over abortion, mainly because they don’t want to acknowledge that there’s a real live person surrounding that fetus, a real live person who may have reasons for not wanting to have a (or another, as is often the case) baby. If they acknowledge that the mother is a woman with her own motivations, then the discussion gets complicated, and they don’t like complicated.
They don’t like complicated because their whole position is based on some pretty flimsy logical ground, and anything other than an emotional “abortion bad” response is a loss for them. So they do this kind of crap, and unfortunately, it works way too often.
I’ve seen this billboard a couple of times recently, and it strikes me as about as fair an anti-Obama ad as you’re likely to see. It has problems, which I’ll get into in a bit, but it does offer a distinct choice and a mostly factual one.
President Obama does support same-sex marriage. He’s said so on national tv and has directed the Justice Dept to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court.
And the President also supports a woman’s right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy. It’s not correct to say, as this ad does, that he supports abortion—that’s actually a fairly meaningless statement given how complex an issue abortion is. Majorities of Americans support access to abortion in at least some cases, after all. It’s only a hardcore minority who want to ban it outright.
But the ad does its job—it defines the cultural issues that the Republicans who paid for and designed this ad think are important: equality for people in the gay and lesbian community and the rights of women to make decisions about their reproductive health.
So when I see that sign, I know immediately what’s at stake in this election, and I know my answer.
Yes.
