Santorum's Selective Marriage Memory
Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum had strong words for the people at the Values Voters Summit this Friday. From a heartfelt story of his child who had only lived 2 hours after being born with a fatal defect to the decision to end his speech flanked by his wife and children, Santorum proved ably that he "never put social issues and values issues on the back burner," as he memorably opened.
Santorum devoted the bulk of his marks to abortion - however, his stance on same sex marriage also got some of the choicer quotes of the afternoon. Santorum called the decision by the Obama administration not to enforce DOMA an "abomination" and accused Obama of deliberately flouting the law by instructing military chaplains to marry gay and lesbian soldiers. "He has instructed people in the military to break the law," Santorum thundered.
Santorum's focus on marriage was not accidental - in an election year so dominated by fiscal issues, Santorum's hardline stance on social conservatism needed a link to economic concerns. He made that link through marriage. Unfortunately, the argument he made backfires when you analyze the facts.
Santorum cited a statistic when discussing the importance of marriage that shows 5% of two-parent households are below the poverty line, whereas 30% of single parent households are. This line of argument certainly makes a convincing case for marriage as a stabilizer. Unfortunately for Santorum, that doesn't necessarily translate to "standing up and defending the institution of marriage as between one man and one woman."
Put simply, Santorum's comparison is correct, but it leaves facts out. The full story is as follows: A study by the Williams Institute found, using data from the 2000 Census, that while 5.4 percent of married heterosexual couples are living below the poverty line, the same is true of 6.9 percent of lesbian couples, and a bare 4.0 percent of gay male couples. This exposes a very awkward hole in Santorum's logic - if these statistics tell us what sort of family is best suited to raise children, shouldn't we be encouraging men to tie the knot with each other? Presumably, the statistical argument has limits, after all.
The fact that Santorum has to strain to make what is at bottom a moral argument against gay marriage into something tangentially tied to economics using a weakly argued statistical point shows the limit of his appeal in this election cycle. Values Voters, it seems, will need to look elsewhere for their all-of-the-above package.
