In the end, I've decided, after a decade of absurdities, Rick Santorum is not funny, just weird.

The Pennsylvania senator's latest outburst of cruel insensitivity -- imagining some tie between the ''culture" of Boston and the behavior of priest-rapists -- is garden variety demagoguery.

I'm glad he has been denounced and called to account by Senator Edward Kennedy and Representatives Ed Markey and Barney Frank, but I worry that the condemnation of Santorum's bizarre behavior may elevate his comments to a level of seriousness that is not merited.

The same concern should prompt decent people everywhere to battle against the constant attempts by President Bush and his architect, Karl Rove, to politicize the terrorist attacks on this country nearly four years ago. Making preposterous assertions about how those of differing ideologies and politics reacted trivializes the loss of those whose family members and other loved ones perished in the attacks. Given the fresh nature of these wounds, this kind of gutter politics is cruel.

It's no different with those who suffered the extreme trauma of sexual abuse as young people from authority figures who took hideous advantage of their vulnerability. Their extreme pain, and their families' pain, is ongoing and deep, in large part because their suffering has yet to result in justice. Playing politics with it is beyond obscene.

Santorum started doing this three years ago in something he wrote for a website, Catholic Online. The offending paragraph had no wiggle room in it:

''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 secret that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."

For some reason, he and his spokesman expanded on this gibberish last week, adding the interesting theory that openness to ''sexual freedom" is more ''predominant" in Boston. And his spokesman went further, linking the priest-rapists to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s and to ''liberal bias" at Harvard and other local universities.

As insight into the mind of a demagogue, this garbage is fascinating in its embrace of contemporary media politics, where the headline value of an assertion always trumps evidence.

According to data compiled by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York for the US Conference of Bishops, accusations of child sexual abuse have been leveled at slightly less than 4,400 priests involving more than 10,600 children. Unfortunately, for Santorum, this sad narrative encompasses much more than the so-called sexual revolution. It goes all the way back to 1950, when books and movies were still routinely ''banned" in Boston. It would be interesting to have Santorum declaim at length on sex-crazed Boston in the 1960s, but as someone who somehow survived those days (and at Harvard, no less) I could testify from personal experience that Boston was not exactly Sodom.

As Kennedy pointed out last week, many conservatives -- Bill Frist and Lamar Alexander, among others -- managed as well to survive Harvard experiences without becoming child molesters. The White House chief of staff, Andy Card, also managed to make it to responsible maturity despite the pernicious effects of this evil culture.

It is not even accurate to assert that Boston was the center of the child abuse horror. A demagogue feasting off headlines could be forgiven three years ago for equating headlines with deeper truth, but the fact is, as Kennedy put it, that this horrific scandal knew no state or ideological boundaries. Using a simple, clarifying concept -- priests accused as a percent of priests in the affected diocese -- the ''center" turns out to have been Covington, Ky. -- known to business travelers everywhere as the home of Cincinnati's airport. The percentage of accused priests there from 1950 on was 9.6 percent, compared to 7 percent in Boston.

Perhaps Santorum could examine the wild, permissive sexual climates in such dens of iniquity as Albany, Jackson, Miss., and Belleville, Ill., all of which had greater concentrations of accused priests than Boston did.

It's fun to pierce a demagogue's self-inflated balloon. But where Santorum should be condemned is in his trivialization of child abuse -- one of society's major, ignored and hidden problems for centuries. Fortunately, the voters in Pennsylvania get a chance to evaluate this guy's conduct next year.

By Thomas Oliphant, Boston Globe, Jul 17, 2005

Cheap shots

I have participated with various clergy-abuse advocacy groups over the last few years, including both SNAP and the Link-Up.

Sen. Rick Santorum's remarks turn the facts in these sad matters upside-down.

Placing blame on the culture of the victims, instead of on the hypocrisy and callousness of the criminals, degrades any opportunity for justice, accountability or healing.

Victims do not need such distortion, diminishment or denial of the cause of their suffering. And Pennsylvanians do not need such hateful, insensitive rhetoric from their elected officials.

I can't fathom an educated man such as Sen. Santorum deliberately spreading totally divisive and inaccurate, partisan cheap shots. An apology is surely in order. Perhaps a confession as well, and a bit of penance.

Ken Schneider, Waterford, Mich.
Post Gazette editor's note: The writer was born and raised in Westwood.

Letter to the editor, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Jul 20, 2005

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