Calm Down, Cap'n

This seems to be the advice that NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez is offering to CQ's Ed Morrissey over the Rick Santorum/Ted Kennedy spat.

Just to review:

In a rare personal attack on the Senate floor, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy accused Senator Rick Santorum on Wednesday of being self-righteous and insensitive for a column he wrote three years ago linking Boston's liberalism to the sex abuse scandal in its Catholic diocese.

Santorum, R-PA, wrote in the July 2002 column for Catholic Online that promoting alternative lifestyles feeds such aberrant behavior as priests molesting children.

Note the emphasis. Santorum's article isn't anything recent. Why would Uncle Teddy suddenly blow his overloads about it now? Is it Santorum's reference to it this week, or could it be the proximity to the Pennsylvania Pachyderm's hallway exchange with Hillary Clinton, which reportedly grew out of Mrs. Clinton's ire at Santorum's new book, It Takes A Family, which is unambiguously aimed at answering her tome It Takes A Village?

That little detail appears not to have occurred to the Cap'n in his haste to be Uncle Teddy's right-wing amen chorus:

As a Catholic and a conservative, nothing would please me more than if we could blame the sexual-abuse scandals of the Church on a permissive society. Unfortunately, it simply isn't true. Pedophilia has nothing to do with liberal sexual mores. The sexual abuse of children involves illnesses without cures, and the scandals have to do with a church hierarchy that refused to recognize that and keep sick priests away from vulnerable boys and girls. [emphasis added]

How very...psychological of him. Kinda flies in the face of his later quip about "Conservatives don't blame society for the actions of individuals. Crimes are the responsibility of the criminals themselves." Unless they're "sick," I suppose. And dinna think that there isn't a slippery-slope connection between "liberal sexual mores" and pedophilia. Who could have imagined even ten years ago that there would even be a phrase like "gay marriage"? That's exactly the insidious, "frog in the boiling pot" way that moral decay advances, which was and is Santorum's central point.

Except, of course, that the freshly scrubbed Keystoner wasn't blaming the "Sorry, Father, we don't have any more inflatable alter boy dolls in stock" scandal solely on a "permissive society." He was citing that as one significant factor in the problem, or so I glean from what he actually wrote in July 2002:

Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm. [emphasis added]

Linking the priesthood's "hide the candellabra" problem to Boston is the hook EMK used to come to Mrs. Clinton's obsequious defense. But that link isn't all that objectionable upon even the most rudimentary reflection. Beantown was where the scandal first emerged into public view, and Santorum was writing before its full (and undrempt of) extent was known. And do I really have to remind Morrissey, to say nothing of the Massachusetts Manatee, that Boston was where the courts foisted sodomarriage on the nation at large? If that doesn't accredit that city's credentials as "a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America," I'll pay Teddy's bar tab for the next week.

What's that expression? If you decide to build yourself a compost heap, you can't complain when it attracts flies.

That's the approach K-Lo takes this morning:

I just read [Santorum's 2002 essay] quickly, but it doesn’t seem to warrant the outrage Ted Kennedy has belatedly taken to the Senate floor with. If you read liberalism as relativism, as Santorum clearly means it in the piece, what he says makes some sense. He wasn’t blaming the people of Boston for the scandals in the Catholic Church. He wasn’t excusing any criminals for their crimes or trying to erase their culpability. He wasn’t blaming some random gay man in Boston. John Kerry didn’t cause the scandals. But a culture that isn’t too keen on traditional moral values, right vs. wrong, and discipline, might play some kind of contributing role in what should be a stalwart in these realms (the Catholic Church) not teaching, cultivating, and enforcing what it should be. That, it seems, is what Santorum was saying. He wasn’t the only one saying that kinda thing. And folks would have been remiss not to ask such questions.

Morrissey does his best "seminar caller" impression....

Normally I would rather eat raw squid with mushrooms and beets than agree with Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. Neither of these men conducted themselves with much honor during their political careers. Both owe so many apologies to so many people that hearing them call for someone else to apologize almost makes me spit out my beverage over my laptop screen. But....

....he has a choice of bending the knee to transparent opposition demagoguery or seeing it, as well as the words of a supposed political ally, for what they both actually are.

As with his overreaction to The Truth About Hillary, the good Cap'n, to evoke the old knight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, has once again "chosen poorly."