The rise — at least temporarily — of Rick Santorum has given rise to speculation of late, most notably by David Brooks, that it might facilitate a rethinking on the right about how America addresses some of the hard-to-deny social pathologies that characterize much of American society. Chiming in to this debate is Michael Gerson. He argues that Santorum’s approach to such matters reflects an alternative religiously influenced conservative tradition (“compassionate conservatism”) to what Gerson regards as the libertarian knee-jerk anti-government position.
There is, however, something dissatisfying about all this. On the one hand, self-described compassionate conservatives understand there is no such thing as morally neutral laws or morally indifferent government policies. At some level (even quite remote), all laws and policies embody some type of moral logic (which is either coherent or incoherent). Thus they cannot help but shape — for better and worse — a society’s moral culture. That’s just one reason among many why the legal treatment of issues like abortion, euthanasia, pornography, and marriage matters, and why they can’t, as some libertarians claim, be simply relegated to the private sphere.
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