Back in 2005 Rick Santorum wrote a book - "It Takes a Family", a little dig a Hillary’s "It Takes a village."

Rick was facing an uphill climb for re-election to the US Senate from Pennsylvania when the book came out. It didn’t help, His home state trounced him by 700,000 votes

Now that Rick appears to on the verge of beating Romney in Michigan and potentially becoming the Republican front runner, the book has recently received lots of scrutiny.

"The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness."

"We now have a generation that has grown up with the belief, inspired by the Sixties' free-love assault on sexual mores, that true love is a feeling, and that it should not be resisted or constrained--rather, its ultimate validation is through sexual relations, without regard to the outdated social convention of marriage."   (Rick was 11 years old at the time of Woodstock so I doubt he had first hand knowledge of sixties "free love"!)

So what are we to make of Rick Santorum?

His book has been extensively reviewed. It is not considered by most a conservative screed pot-boiler. In many portions it tries to provide a dense analysis of his beliefs.

"In developing my understanding of social policy," Santorum writes, "I have learned a lot from the tradition of Catholic social thought." Here he is referring to the Catholic social concept of "subsidiarity" - that social problems should be addressed at the lowest possible unit level. Santorum is thinking the "family" as the smallest possible unit. His definition of "family" is mom, dad and 2.4 children.

"For our part, conservatives, with respect to the poor, haven't tried hard enough ... The real solution, the conservative solution to the problems of low-income America, is to structure all our programs around the family."

Now these words were written in 2005 before we ran off to Iraq and ran up a $15 trillion national debt. I don’t know about you but I can’t see any President thinking about anti-poverty programs in the near future.

Besides his social views, Rick’ legal education has made him aware of what he considers the unintended consequences of certain Supreme Court decisions.

He laments the reasoning behind the 1965 Griswold decision (overturning a Connecticut law that banned the sale of condoms) because it introduced the constitutional zone of privacy that later allowed the Supreme Court to legalize abortion.   See my post on this subject:

http://open.salon.com/blog/toritto/2012/02/16/contraception_and_abortion_rights_-_the_connection

Santorum even expresses his concern with the precedent set by Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 civil-rights decision that decreed that states could not ban interracial marriages. What troubles Santorum is not the result (ending Jim Crow legislation) but that "16 years later, the IRS ruled that religious groups opposed to interracial marriage could be stripped of their tax-exempt status." Shessh.

You need not ask where Santorum stands on abortion rights.

There is much to chew on in Santorum’s own words.

The Philadelphia Enquirer, before Santorum’s election defeat called him "One of the finest minds of the thirteenth century"

Please nominate him!! Please!!

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