"The sudden rise of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who has emphasized his Christian faith on the campaign trail, is threatening to draw front-runner Mitt Romney into difficult territory - the culture wars."

It begins with the false premise that:

"Romney has talked about job creation on a daily basis, bashed Democratic President Barack Obama relentlessly, and cast himself as an experienced businessman who can fix the economy since launching his second bid for the White House in June. He has steered far away from divisive social issues like abortion and gay marriage."

Yes Romney, like Santorum, has emphasized jobs and the economy. Duh.

But he has never backed away or downgraded his stance on marriage. He's been rather good at debate--more comfortable than most other candidates--at defending his views.

The new prominence of "culture war" issues is coming from the ferocity of the attacks directed at Rick Santorum, fanned by the mainstream media.

And unlike what Reuters suggests this will be a net vote-getter for the GOP candidates. This is why Pres. Obama, according to senior advisers, is staying away from endorsing gay marriage before the election. He knows the issue will cost him votes and gain ones for the GOP.

"...Certainly, there were always members of the gay community who would rather not have borne the burden of existential difference, who would rather have stayed who they were while seeing society change in such a way that who they are might be allowed to count as normal. The domestication of same-sex desire is surely a good thing for these people. But their individual advantage does not mean that the world as a whole is not losing something, and it has been one of the great fallacies of the liberal defenders of gay marriage to assume that what is good for any given individual is for that very reason good for society. The loss we have in fact suffered is one akin to the loss of some mighty species of wild boar as it is bred downward into a fat, ugly, lazy, edible pig; or to the move of indigenous Amazonians from the rainforest into squalid urban slums."

Some interesting observations on how as marriage came to be seen as about love and the source of all happiness, it also came to be seen as work. Just as work is now suppose to reflect an urgent and creative passion:

"What is more difficult to understand, and what seems to invite only controversial theses, is the question of why the conception of marriage as love, on the one hand, and as work on the other, emerged together in the modern era. Some have argued that it was precisely the expectation that marriage should be sustained by love that brought the institution to a crisis, and brought us to a situation more absurd than Shaw could have imagined, where couples are expected to work in order to preserve themselves in the exhausting and abnormal condition in which they started out."

The author, a professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, attributes this to the capacity of capitalism to domesticate all other ways of being.

... [a] big reason he has been written off from the start is that most political reporters have covered the former Pennsylvania senator in the Senate for the better part of a decade and have reached the conclusion that he is about as lovable as a porcupine with the charm of a possum. He is not your average back-slapping, jovial politician.

... Most politicians thrive on giving soft speeches with gauzy visions of happiness. They are related to the snake oil salesman or the used car salesman. President Obama was one of the best ever. Literally, there are still millions of people out there taking the snake oil he sold them and wondering why they aren’t getting better. Or they are still sitting on the side of the road in the broken down car he sold them jiggling the steering wheel as if it were still going.

That is not Rick Santorum. He does not offer rosy promises. Instead, he talks about fighting. And he talks about “truth.” Or he recites scripture from the Bible, usually the Old Testament. The motto emblazoned on his bus here in Iowa is: “Join the fight.”

... In these deeply troubled times, voters appear especially attracted to Mr. Santorum’s mixture of raw honesty, serious demeanor and battle-ready politics. It might just be that the time of the porcupine has finally come.

God bless him, God bless him. This is a serious fight.

Do not underestimate the evil intellectual elites can justify by dubbing moral critiques "anti-science" -- read more at National Review Online.

This would lead to the absurd conclusion that NOM endorses the editorial positions of the New York Times, because NOM links to them--or The Advocate for that matter, as we often link to stories in the gay press.

If you want to know what NOM's message is, there are abundant videos and press stories (including our own press releases) with me, or Brian Brown, or other NOM personnel actually speaking. Fair enough to criticize us for what we actually believe and say.

The standard "a link constitutes an endorsement" would cut off the free flow of ideas at the knees.

I would like to say personally that nothing in any argument I've ever made on gay marriage, rests on the idea that same-sex couples harm their own children at any higher rates than any other family form. (If there is data that shows this, I've never seen it.)

I have written at this point hundreds of thousands of words defending marriage as the union of husband and wife, resting on the idea that society has a special and unique interest in unions that make new life (inside or outside of marriage) and that marriage's main public mission is connecting children to their mothers and fathers.

I'm very proud of what NOM has accomplished and the way it has accomplished it.

The National Catholic Register:

Daniel Avila says he resigned from his position at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops because of his “desire to see the bishops continue their effective and courageous witness without distraction."

... In a statement released exclusively to the Register (see below), Avila explained the resignation for the first time. He said he quickly realized that the firestorm following his Oct. 28 column had the potential to obstruct the mission of the nation’s bishops in the public-policy arena.

“The USCCB must advance the Church’s policy positions recognizing the inviolable dignity of every human being and the inalterable nature of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. These are not matters of speculation for the Church, but risked being obscured by the aftermath from my own speculations,” he wrote.

He said that in accepting his resignation, the USCCB had demonstrated a “commitment to marriage and dignity of all persons.”

... Jeffrey Mirus, president of Trinity Communications, provided commentary about Avila’s column on his website, CatholicCulture.org.

In his commentary, Mirus said, “Avila chose to write on a supremely sensitive issue. He did not get it quite right, and the bishops rather understandably want to control the message, keeping it absolutely free from theological misunderstanding. One would, of course, like to see equal control over Catholics who publish the view Avila attempted to refute."

Meanwhile, for years, the Illinois DCFS did business with a man named George E. Smith (a close personal friend of the then-head of DCFS Erwen "Mac" McEwen) who apparently bilked DCFS and other state agencies of $18 million dollars.

More troublingly, Smith actually administered psychotropic drugs to children in foster care without proper medical care or consent.

When Gov. Quinn found out, he quietly pressured McEwen to resign. No public condemnation. No calls to investigate. Nothing.

The "Chicago Way" is apparently now the 'Illinois Way", where politics trumps not only good government, but basic decency.

We've mentioned this development before but see this report in Business Week:

"McEwen, who described Smith as his "personal friend and mentor," stopped cooperating with investigators in May, the report said, although state employees are required to aid such probes. He announced his resignation in August and left DCFS at the end of September.

Gov. Pat Quinn said Monday that McEwen "was given the opportunity to resign and he took that opportunity." Quinn, appearing at an unrelated news conference, did not take any other questions on the issue and did not explain why he didn't publicly disclose the reason for McEwen's departure.

Brooke Anderson, a spokeswoman for the Democrat, said the law barred Quinn from disclosing the misconduct. However, that law applies to early release of "investigatory files and reports" from the inspector general; it does not prohibit a governor from saying he believes a member of his Cabinet is mismanaging an agency.

Anderson said all contracts and grants to Smith were halted and that DCFS is taking steps to make sure nothing like this happens again. She could not describe the steps that are being taken.

McEwen and Smith did not return messages seeking their comment on the allegations."

My response on the Public Discourse is here (excerpt below):

Her essay reads like a dreary slog through the gap between myth and reality of the sexual revolution. Kate goes back to speak to younger women today, and is appalled by what she finds among 20-somethings:

Most of them said that though they’d had a lot of sex, none of it was particularly sensual or exciting. It appears the erotic promises of the 1960s sexual revolution have run aground on the shoals of changing sex ratios, where young women and men come together in fumbling, drunken couplings fueled less by lust than by a vague sense of social conformity.

What caused the “de-eroticization of sex,” she wonders.

Who exactly are the new enemies of Eros?

Sex has been divorced from meaning. Men are not being raised to be good family men, and women are not being raised to appreciate good family men. And men are failing to become the kind of men women want. Porn is available for all as a substitute for life. . . . .

The truth is celebrating singleness — i.e., celebrating “not doing something” — makes no sense. Loving is better than not loving. Choosing to love and commit to a husband or a child is a much higher ideal than choosing not to; that’s why it needs to be celebrated and idealized.

Of course, not everyone marries or becomes a mother, and of course every human life has other possibilities for meaning, and other forms of love to give.

But all of these other loves — the aunt, the grandparent, the best friend — came into being because somewhere some woman gave herself to the independence-shattering act of making a family.

When I was young, Steve Jobs was also young. Now he is gone.

Others are better qualified to eulogize his achievements. I was struck in the publicity surrounding his death by the attention paid to Steve's complicated family background.

He was born to two political science graduate students in 1955 who gave him up for adoption. They did not abort him, and they gave him a family that Steve Jobs insisted was his real parents.

His father, a high school dropout, seems to have been an enormous influence on him.

He reconnected as an adult with his biological family members through his sister Mona Simpson, who is a nationally acclaimed novelist.

He is by his own account (and he was very chary of sharing personal information) close to his sister. Their similarities caused him to re-evaluate the importance of biology.

His connection to his father--not his biofather--may have also lead to his determined failure to reconnect with his biological father.

Many ways to intersect with this complicated story. His living biological father spoke to the press in August in what is clearly a desperate (and failed) attempt to get Steve Jobs to communicate.

A lot of pathos. No clear conclusions. But somehow biology does matter:

“This might sound strange, though, but I am not prepared, even if either of us was on our deathbed, to pick up the phone to call him,” Jandali told the newspaper. “Steve will have to do that as the Syrian pride in me does not want him ever to think I am after his fortune. I am not. I have my own money. What I don’t have is my son ... and that saddens me.”

We cannot explain to ourselves why, but it does.

Prof. George begins: "Courts usurped the authority of Congress and acted in a way that removed an entire class of human beings from the law's protection. Lincoln said that if this is accepted "the people will cease to be their own rulers." After Lincoln's death we enacted the 14th amendment. Many people say we need to wait for Roe v. Wade to be reversed but Section 5 of the 14th gives Congress the right to enforce the guarantees of equal protection and due process. Would you propose to Congress legislation to protect life in all stages?" Mitt Romney responds [paraphrase]:

"I would support justices who support the Constitution and would return that power to the states. Is there a constitutional path to have Congress say we will push aside the decision of the Supreme Court, and return to the states or pass their own values -- that would create a constitutional crisis. That might happen but that wouldn't be something I would precipitate. I would look for people on the Supreme Court who will interpret the Constitution, not impose their own values. I'm not looking to creating a constitutional crisis. I would live within the law, the Constitution as I understand it without creating a constitutional crisis..."

George: Will your Veep share your pro-life, pro-marriage views?

Romney: "I certainly imagine so, I haven't made any selections in that regard, I would expect they would all be pro-life and pro-traditional marriage. I think its presumptuous to think of who my Veep would be at this stage. These are important enough issues that the person I select would share my views."

George: [question about federal money going to states that discriminate against organizations that follow their religious convictions.]

Romney: "I believe in religious tolerance and religious liberty. That means to me we are not going to force people of faith to violate their faith in order to practice their professions ...I'm not one of those who says get rid of the conscience protections and [force people to do things that violate their faith.]

I would say in [Massachusetts] about half of adoptions were being placed by Catholic Charities because they would not place children in homes with same-sex couples.

That's a mistake, we should permit people to apply their faith, [especially when there are many other agencies who can deliver services]."

Grading Mitt Romney: B+

Prof. George: "Power delegated to national government by Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. You have a strong and consistent pro-life record in Congress. Whether in view of those delegated powers, would you propose to Congress legislation to protect life in all stages, or would you have to wait for Roe. v. Wade to be reversed by the Supreme Court?" Congressman Paul answers [paraphrase]:

"No I wouldn't wait, I would remove the federal jurisdiction from the courts so the states could immediately do what they want. The 14th Amendment [contravenes] the 9th and 10th Amendment. There are people who use the 14th Amendment to do almost anything they want. The 14th Amendment has been used to increase the size and scope of government."

Prof. George responds: "The language is clear, you cannot deny 'life or liberty' without due process of law."

Ron Paul: "Murder should be a state issue."

Prof. George: "If the state removed protection against murder from a class of human beings, or the newly born, or the handicapped newborn, wouldn't that call for action at the national level?"

Ron Paul: "If you want to stretch your interpretation and stretch the power of the federal government. ...I can understand your argument but I think it rejects the notion that states are part of our government. When we can, and we can, we have done it all our history, we can deal with violence and murder, it's a state issue, I don't see why it should be a federal issue ...you are asking for more policeman at the federal level. I don't understand why we've met so much resistance from removing the jurisdiction from Congress. You could do it by a majority vote with the president signing it, you don't have to wait for Roe V. Wade to be repealed."

Grading Ron Paul: Marriage questions weren't asked, so I'm going to give Paul a pass.

Newt gets extra credit for giving Dr. George a shout-out at the beginning on the Manhattan Declaration: "What Dr. George began with the Manhattan statement to re-center American culture is very important ...this is very important." From his opening remarks:

"Always a citizen, never a subject. A set of truths about the nature of being human. We are human within a fabric created by God. These rights are inalienable. Which means no politician, no bureaucrat, no judge can take them away from you ...we are in grave danger of descending from being citizens into being subjects."

Dr. George: "Pres. Lincoln's First Inaugural, he spoke of the court usurping the authority of the people on slavery. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment authorizes Congress to enforce the guarantees of equal protection and due process. Would you as President propose legislation to protect life?" Speaker Gingrich answers [paraphrase]:

Yes. But there are five other issues. There are a number of issues on which the courts have usurped the people's power. Jefferson wrote that the Supreme Court unimpeded would be "an oligarchy." This is the center of American exceptionalism. We are a people of law. To be a people of law you have to have a structure. By a 5-4 vote appointed lawyers can be the equivalent of a Constitutional Convention ...we are going to have a big fight with the lawyer class. Jefferson in 1802 passes judicial reform act which eliminates judges ...I am not as bold as Thomas Jefferson. I would no more than eliminate Judge Berry in San Antonio and the 9th Circuit ...that's not a rhetorical comment. The executive branches have an obligation to defend the Constitution against judges who are tyrannical."

Gingrich on marriage:

"I support a constitutional amendment on marriage. We have every right to defend a 3,000-year clear record [on what marriage is] and I don't think we should be intimidated against [defending it]."

Grading Newt Gingrich: "B"

Prof. George leads off: "Does Congress have the power under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to enforce the equal protection of unborn life?" Cain responds (paraphrase):

"Yes I could support that. I would challenge the U.S. Congress to do its job. The president has the responsibility to be president, [focus on] national security, preserve, protect and enforce the Constitution of the U.S., not re-write it. Provide the strategic leadership on all the issues we face."

Prof. George: "Should the federal government be subsidizing states that discriminate against religious foster and adoption cases?"

"No, because I believe in the First Amendment. The federal government should not be discriminating against any legitimate religion in this country."

Prof. George: "How does your position on marriage differ from Pres. Obama's position?"

"The first thing I would do is make it clear I support the Defense of Marriage Act. I do support traditional marriage. So I happen to believe in addition to being Commander in Chief, [the President is] also Communicator in Chief, to talk about some of these values our Founding Fathers got right. I would use that platform to encourage the values we know the Founding Fathers embraced."

Prof. George: "The two great engines to fight poverty are a vibrant economy and a strong marriage culture. What can we do to rebuild a marriage culture?"

"We have to stop incenting (incentivizing?) broken homes, stop 'incenting' women to have babies to get money from the government.'"

Will you choose a Veep who shares your pro-life and pro-marriage convictions?

"Absolutely."

Grading Herman Cain: a solid "A-"