In Defense of Rick Santorum

If the polls are accurate, Senator Rick Santorum is about to lose his re-election bid. That's a good thing. Santorum is a bad cliche of the culture wars, a powerful politician who actually believes that the earth is 6,000 years old, that abortion is tantamount to murder and the Catholic church scandal began in Massachusetts because Boston is a "liberal bastion". In recent months, he's also gotten rather deranged on the topic of foreign policy, arguing that what we need is more pre-ememptive action against Iran, because our aggressive war in Iraq worked out so well.

And yet, when Rick Santorum loses on November 9th, the Senate will also lose one of its most persistent and creative voices on the topic of poverty. As David Brooks noted in his column yesterday:

There has been at least one constant in Washington over the past 12 years: almost every time a serious piece of antipoverty legislation surfaces in Congress, Rick Santorum is there playing a leadership role.

In the mid-1990s, he was a floor manager for welfare reform, the most successful piece of domestic legislation of the past 10 years. He then helped found the Renewal Alliance to help charitable groups with funding and parents with flextime legislation.

More recently, he has pushed through a stream of legislation to help the underprivileged, often with Democratic partners. With Dick Durbin and Joe Biden, Santorum has sponsored a series of laws to fight global AIDS and offer third world debt relief. With Chuck Schumer and Harold Ford, he's pushed to offer savings accounts to children from low-income families. With John Kerry, he's proposed homeownership tax credits. With Chris Dodd, he backed legislation authorizing $860 million for autism research. With Joe Lieberman he pushed legislation to reward savings by low-income families.

In addition, he's issued a torrent of proposals, many of which have become law: efforts to fight tuberculosis; to provide assistance to orphans and vulnerable children in developing countries; to provide housing for people with AIDS; to increase funding for Social Services Block Grants and organizations like Healthy Start and the Children's Aid Society; to finance community health centers; to combat genocide in Sudan.

I'm not sure it's possible to disentangle Santorum's noxious culture war rhetoric from his good deeds on anti-poverty issues. In other words, I don't think we can get the Sudan Santorum without the stem cell Santorum. Nevertheless, I think it's important to acknowledge both sides of the man, to see his political intentions as both noble and horribly misguided. When we demonize our opponents without recognizing their best intentions, we lapse into the same culture war dichotomies that we are supposed to deplore.

In general, Scienceblogs is the anti-religious blogs. We are a bunch of rabid atheists and tepid agnostics, a theological position that aligns us with the 10 percent of the population that believes in natural selection but not angels. We can go ahead and laugh at the other 90 percent, mock their Sunday rituals and deplore their grip on the biological facts. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: most of the population could use a primer in evolutionary theory. But we shouldn't be so quick to judge their faith.

I live in a small city. It's too small to have a taxpayer financed homeless shelter, but big enough to have a few dozen homeless people. Who fills the void? The churches. When the nights get cold, many of the churches here open their doors. Volunteers spend the night, and follow the most worthy command of the New Testament: to help the meek. Some of these churches have a liberal bent, and some of them don't. Some of the same pastors who help take care of the homeless probably give sermons advocating intelligent design.

As biologists, we know that this is how human nature operates. Every individual is a complex stew of alleles and motives; nobody is always anything. We should apply the same sense of nuance and subtlety to the culture wars that we apply to our biolgical subjects. Rick Santorum has said many things I deplore. I disagree with him on just about every political issue. But the same faith that inspires his tirades against stem cells also inspires his actions on poverty. I'm a pragmatist. Like E.O. Wilson, I believe that we should spend less time worrying about our beliefs, and more time worrying about our actions. So I hope Rick Santorum loses; but I hope his replacement will do as much for the impoverished as he has.