Once Rick Santorum starts talking about rubbers it's time to stick Santorum in a rubber room all his own --and throw away the key.

John F. Kennedy famously said he wanted to be known as the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic -- not the Catholic candidate for President.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, has made abundantly clear throughout his career and during this campaign that he wants to be THE Catholic President. Indeed, as EJ Dionne wrote in this morning's Washington Post, Santorum's Catholicism is "the most important thing about him."

In his always kind and mild-mannered way, Dionne gives Santorum the benefit of the doubt when he calls Santorum a Catholic "of a certain kind."

Santorum is on one side of what Dionne calls "a long-standing debate in the Church about how to build a decent society."

There are those Catholics like Dionne (and me) who stand on the side of social justice and represent "an older American tradition" that agrees the family is "an essential social building block" but also thinks capitalism needs regulation and correction "if it is to serve the common good and protect the family itself."

Then there are those like Santorum who are "social renewal" Catholics who see "opposition to abortion as a foundational matter and opposition to gay marriage as essential to "protecting" the family."  

It's a view, says Dionne, that sees the federal government "less as a guarantor of social fairness than as inflicting harm on the nation's moral character."

Now, I'm willing to accept that Santorum's signature issue, abortion, is morally and legally complicated with conflicted people on both sides of the pro-choice/pro-life divide. I'm also willing to accept that it takes time for people to get used to change, like gay marriage. And while I think he's mistaken, Santorum's defense of the Catholic Church hierarchy in the priest scandal was at least predictable.

But if anything screamed out "It's none of your god damned business!" it's the decision of a married couple on when, where and under what circumstances to start a family.  

Yet, there's Rick Santorum, like the good Catholic boy that he is, sticking his big nose where it doesn't belong, while making breathtakingly stupid comments on birth control which mark him as an Opus Dei radical who subscribes to an obsolete worldview in which the individual vanishes entirely into the hive. This is not, needless to say, a worldview that's compatible with democracy, at least not as democracy is commonly understood.

In a recent interview, Santorum told a stunned listener: "Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country."

He's right. No serious candidate has talked about the dangers of condoms to the country. Ever. And by making opposition to birth control a signature plank of his campaign, Santorum is boldly (if recklessly) going where no presidential candidate of a major party has ever gone before.

Speaking to ABC's Jake Tapper, for instance, Santorum openly voiced his opposition to Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1965 that struck down that state's ban on providing contraception or information about it to state residents, including married couples.

In the majority opinion in that case Justice William O. Douglas wrote that American's basic rights are violated when "we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives."  Indeed, he said, the very idea of laws controlling the intimate lives of couples "is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship."

But not to Rick Santorum. Asked about the legitimacy of laws forbidding the sale or distribution of contraceptives, even to married couples, Santorum said: "The state has a right to do that. I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have." 

Stated in a generalized, abstract way Santorum’s Catholic-inspired conservatism has a superficial appeal that does not sound that much different in its aspirations from the “civic republicanism” espoused by the Founding Fathers who hoped their new Constitution would provide the mechanisms to call up citizens from self-interest to disinterestedness.

“One of Santorum’s strengths is that he understands that a nation isn’t just an agglomeration of individuals,” says David Brooks in his New York Times column today, “it’s a fabric of social relationships.” 

As Brooks says, Santorum presents an extended argument against radical individualism: “Just as original sin is man’s inclination to try to walk alone without God, individualism is man’s inclination to try to walk alone among his fellows,” Santorum writes.  

Communities breed character, argues Santorum, so “government cannot be agnostic about the character of its citizens because the less disciplined the people are, the more government must step in to provide order.” 

That would all be beautiful poetry except for the fact that Santorum does not put forth these propositions as matters of philosophy or sociology but as parts of a legally enforceable political agenda. 

“What makes Santorum Santorum,” says Andrew Sullivan, “is not just that he believes homosexual sex and contraception are immoral - but that the government has a vital and legitimate role to penalize private sexual consensual acts if they are not within a heterosexual marriage.” 

Santorum is quite explicit about this, says Sullivan: “Santorum does not believe that you have the right to adult, consensual sex in your own bedroom, if the government decides it's bad for society as a whole. That includes masturbation and contraception on exactly the same grounds as homosexual acts. All of them are sodomy and subject to government regulation. It's clear he believes that such sex is a serious threat to civilization, and only prudential grounds should restrain the government's decision to enforce that morality.” 

Santorum is contemptuous of the whole idea of the pursuit of happiness if it isn't regulated by Catholic natural law, says Sullivan.  He is opposed, in his own words, to "this whole idea of personal autonomy," not to mention "the idea that people should be left alone." Santorum's slogan is "Faith, Family, Freedom," notes Sullivan, “but it is more accurately described as Faith Family and Freedom That Doesn't Violate The Tenets of Faith and Family as defined by Santorum.” 

Santorum's concern about sex becoming "deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure" is neither unique nor occurring in a vacuum. At the very moment Santorum is lecturing the nation on the sinfulness of condoms and the pill the U.S. Catholics bishops are embroiled in a controversy with the Obama administration over a decision last August by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to require all health insurance policies to provide contraception at no extra cost to subscribers.

The bishops say this is the thin edge of tyranny and in December President Obama met privately with Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, the new head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, about this and other matters. The President is said to be considering a request by Dolan and others that the administration expand the current exemption that relieves certain religious employers of the obligation to provide coverage for contraceptives if their beliefs forbid their use.

Religious groups want the exemption broadened to include not only church workers but also the employees of any religiously-affiliated organization, such as hospitals, charitable organizations, parochial schools, or higher education institutions -- as well as the millions served by those institutions.

Women's health advocates note that about 99% of women (including the overwhelming number of Catholic women) use contraceptives at some period during their lifetimes, so expanding the religious exemption would impose an unfair financial burden on the millions of women who work for those religious employers or are served by them.

The bishops say the HHS mandate is a direct attack on Catholic moral teaching and is part of a larger and more pervasive climate of hostility to all religious groups. Indeed, the bishops have even gone so far as to establish a Committee for Religious Liberty to protest the government's actions.

Like many on the religious right, the Catholic bishops have sought to portray efforts that prevent them from imposing Catholic dogma on unwilling audiences as an assault on their religious "liberty."

What the Catholic bishops are trying to do, of course, is exploit the peculiar features of the American social compact in order to impose Catholic doctrine regarding contraceptive use on both Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and doing so in the name of religious "freedom."

Whereas most other Western governments provide health services directly to their citizens or pay doctors and hospitals through a single-payer public insurance program, most Americans have always gotten their health care coverage through their employers. This feature of American social policy gives the bishops a powerful blunt instrument for enforcing religious orthodoxy.

Unlike the European social democracies with their clear divisions between the public and private sectors, those divisions get muddled in America where public services are provided through employer-based partnerships between the public and private sectors, reflecting historic American antagonisms against bureaucracy and state power.

As employers who run schools, universities, hospitals and charitable organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of lay workers (both Catholic and non), in addition to the religious orders themselves, the Catholic Church is trying to use its obligations to provide health insurance to its employees as leverage to impose the Church's own, antiquated, beliefs about contraception on the millions who work for Catholic-run social service agencies or received services from them.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the U.S. Bishops, made this explicit in a recent letter to the New York Times. Walsh argues that the HHS mandate "violates religious liberty" and is a threat to the "very existence and religious identity" of the Catholic social service network.

Sister Walsh then made a threat of her own, telling President Obama that if he wants to maintain the nation's educational, health care and social service network provided by the Catholic Church "he needs to respect the rights of the religious agencies that serve millions every year."

But America's public/private social compact is a two-way street.

If the American bishops think the money they spend on health insurance -- in partnership with their employees, it should be noted - gives them the right to enforce Catholic dogma regarding contraception at the expense of the health care needs and desires of the overwhelming majority of Americans, both Catholics and non-Catholics, then perhaps there are other parts of the American social compact which benefit the Catholic Church that we might want to revisit - such as the research grants and federal student loans that support Catholic colleges and universities, or the public transportation provided to parochial school students, or perhaps even the tax exempt status the government grants to the Church in exchange for providing public services the government itself does not provide.

These are things we need to think about, considering that hardball is a game at which two can play. The problem with any interconnected network, after all, is that once you start pulling at threads you never know what's likely to unravel.