AS LONG AS SANTORUM THINKS LIKE A YANKEE, HE IS A HYPOCRITE | 2003-04-26
The reason that Lott was right is the same reason that Santorum was right. Santorum said that the Supreme Court has torn up the Constitution. What is really wrong with Santorum's comment is that he thinks like a Yankee.
Like other Northern Catholics, Santorum thinks that the Supreme Court didn't start to tear up the Constitution until its decisions on abortion and gay rights. Those decisions, which started in the 1970s, violate tenets of conservative Catholic morality. When the Supreme Court invented a "right to privacy" to strike down all state abortion laws, Northern Catholics suddenly decided the court was getting out of line.
But in 1968, when the Supreme Court struck down all state laws against racial intermarriage, they openly threw the Constitution out the window. The amendments the Supreme Court cited for its 1968 decision were adopted by states almost every one of which had and enforced laws against racial intermarriage. But every Catholic leader praised that decision to the skies.
When it struck down state anti-intermarriage laws in 1968 the Supreme Court simply said that it would be a good idea to strike those laws down, precedent be damned. Every single Catholic leader said that was the way it should be done.
Then when the Court did exactly the same thing about abortion and gay rights, Catholic leaders went ballistic, just like Santorum did. Santorum came down as hard as anybody on Lott's comments about Thurmond, but the fact is that, if Thurmond had been elected, the decisions Santorum is objecting to would not have been made.
To put this in Lott's own words, "If Strom had been elected in 1948 we wouldn't have had all these problems."