Disliking Rick Santorum, I understand. The attacks on him and his wife — in particular, one by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, for how they handled the death of their stillborn baby are disgusting. Pete Wehner speaks for me:

The second point is the casual cruelty of Robinson and those like him. Robinson seems completely comfortable lampooning a man and his wife who had experienced the worst possible nightmare for parents: the death of their child. It is one thing to say you would act differently if you were in the situation faced by Rick and Karen Santorum; it’s quite another to deride them as “crazy” and “very weird,” which is what commentators on the left are increasingly doing, and with particular delight and glee.

We are seeing how ideology and partisan politics can so disfigure people’s minds and hearts that they become vicious in their assaults on those with whom they have political disagreements. I would hope no one I know would, in a thousand years, ridicule parents who were grappling with unfathomable human pain. Even if those parents were liberal. Even if they were running for president and first lady.

The third point is it tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the times.

Ross Douthat amplifies that last point in his column today, but points out that politicians who make their children symbols of political virtue invite criticism, however unseemly that criticism may be. Ross:

But by turning their personal choices to political ends, politicians lose the right to complain when those same personal lives are subject to partisan critiques. They can and should contest these critiques, but they can’t complain about them. In a culture as divided about fundamental issues as our own, the kind of weird attacks that Rick Santorum is enduring come with the vocation he has chosen.

It’s worth considering that the attacks on Santorum bring to mind why so many of us strongly identified with Sarah Palin when she was first tapped by John McCain: before anybody knew anything about her, other than that she had given birth to a Down Syndrome child and was some sort of Evangelical Christian, she drew hateful attacks from the left-liberal cultural elite (I especially remember the NYT blogger who said that she couldn’t be a woman because of her views), simply because of her convictions. It is a foolish mistake to support a political candidate just because she has made the right enemies, and that’s why many of us backed away from Palin once we started to learn more about her, and her unfitness for office. That said, the indecency with which some people went after Palin, especially over her disabled baby, was a shock to the system.

Jeffrey Goldberg on the Santorum situation, responding to one of his readers who accuses him of being a lickspittle to prolifers for being sympathetic to the grieving Santorums:

I have no idea what I would do if, God forbid, we found ourselves in the situation the Santorums found themselves in. It doesn’t strike me as particularly odd that he would bring home the stillborn baby. In my tradition, the body of a loved one is never supposed to be left alone, from death until burial, so the idea that the body should be surrounded by loved ones, in the hospital, home, or funeral home, is not strange to me at all. I also have no idea what the grief would do to me (I never want to find out, obviously), and I think, as a matter of decency and humility, that people who have just lost a child should be given, simultaneously,  a wide berth and unjudgmental support.

Amen. When my sister Ruthie died (at age 42), her friends kept an all-night vigil at her open coffin. This is unusual in this day and time, at least among small-town Protestants. But they didn’t want her to be left alone. It was a beautiful, life-giving thing. The idea that grieving the death of a child in a fairly traditional way (in an anti-traditional culture, mind you) would be seized upon as a reason to condemn the child’s family as a pack of weirdos is incredibly foul. I hope Eugene Robinson has the decency to write a note of apology to the Santorums.

One big regret I have from my own career is a column I wrote in 2001 after the death of the pop star Aaliyah, in which I used her lavish public funeral to make a critical point about how we mourn celebrities. I think the argument I made was a sound one, but it was tasteless and insensitive (though I would also point out that multiple death threats I received over the column were not exactly commendable). Having lived through the death of my sister, I regret that column even more — not, again, because my argument about celebrity mourning was wrong, but because, as Goldberg says, “people who have just lost a child should be given, simultaneously, a wide berth and unjudgmental support.” I was wrong, and though I believe I’ve done this before, I’ll take the opportunity again to apologize to Aaliyah’s family.

Finally, I recommend to you “Letters to Gabriel,” a beautiful book Karen Santorum wrote after the death of her son.

From a big NYT profile of the TV host:

 In 1974, when Colbert was 10, his father, a doctor, and his brothers Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, died in a plane crash while flying to a prep school in New England. “There’s a common explanation that profound sadness leads to someone’s becoming a comedian, but I’m not sure that’s a proven equation in my case,” he told me. “I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so.” He added, in a tone so humble and sincere that his character would never have used it: “She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”

That’s the headline out of last night’s New Hampshire debate. With Romney the heavy favorite to win NH, the real story is the battle for second place. A few other things from last night’s event:

With three days left until the New Hampshire primary, time was quickly running short for some of the Republican candidates to make their case. Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who has been lagging in the polls and has staked his candidacy on the outcome here, passed on nearly every invitation to criticize the others.

Boy, that’s what I don’t get about Huntsman. A couple of months ago I caught him on a cable news interview. He passed up every opportunity to criticize his opponents, even though such criticism would have been completely warranted (this was when Gingrich’s sleazy lobbying relationships were big news). I thought, “This is not a man who is serious about winning.” Again, criticism of his opponents would have been completely legitimate, but he just wouldn’t go there. Why not? It was strange. What’s his game? Michael Brendan Dougherty convinced me that Huntsman would make a good president, but Huntsman has convinced me that Huntsman is on another planet. Matt Welch:

You know why Huntsman won’t win? He puts himself above the fray when the fray isn’t a fray. Basic spending philosophy differences are not “insidery gobbledygook.”

We heard last night from Rick Perry, who went back to Texas to reassess his candidacy for five minutes, then bizarrely decided to stay in. Here is what he will be remembered for last night:

As he sought to make a mark, Mr. Perry went as far as to say that American troops should return to Iraq, calling the recent withdrawal “a huge error for us.”

Rick Perry, in 2012, wants to re-invade Iraq. Er, wow. I wonder if he could even carry Bosque County with that position.

Ron Paul concentrated his fire on the non-Romneys. There is method here:

Paul national campaign chairman Jesse Benton rejected the idea that they are laying off Romney, saying, “Mitt Romney’s not fishing from the same pond as us. We’re fighting to consolidate ourselves as the lone Romney alternative, the anti-Romney. Now, people that support Romney will support Ron in the general election. They’ll get behind the Republican, we have every confidence. The battle right now is to be the anti-Romney…We’re the only candidate with the fundraising base and we’re the only candidate with a national organization and right now, I think we’re starting to show that we’re the only candidate with the election results to be able to do that.”

I think that’s smart — especially given that neither Gingrich nor Santorum had a good debate last night. Paul knows that Romney’s support is shallow, and that he stands to gain greatly by voters seeing him as the only alternative. To be clear, I see no scenario under which Romney fails to get the GOP nomination. But a primary contest that elevates Paul will provide for some great discussion about national questions — especially on foreign policy — that wouldn’t come up if Santorum or Gingrich were Romney’s chief rival.

My mother was sitting on her front porch this morning telling doozy of a Southern gothic tale about life in this parish when she inadvertently let slip a brilliantly observed paradox of life in a small town:

“Of course, all that was a well-known secret.”

Isn’t that just about perfect? In a small place, everybody knows your business, or at least most of your business. But when the business gets really weird and gothicky, as it so often does, at least here in the South, social harmony depends on an unstated agreement that the unpleasant thing will remain publicly unacknowledged. Even if everybody knows it, everybody pretends (out of politeness, or, I guess, fear) that they do not: a well-known secret.

Any of you have examples of well-known secrets where you’re from, and the effect those secrets had on the people who were party to it? I’ve thought of a couple from here, but I’m not going to write about them because local folks who read my blog might know what I’m talking about and not appreciate my airing it, even not using names. I’m thinking there’s no point in risking causing trouble by bringing this stuff up, even obliquely, even though everybody (well, “everybody”) knows this stuff?.

And now you see how the Well-Known Secret works.

In a way, I’m glad to have been pre-occupied with the book stuff today, because I don’t know that I have the constitutional wherewithal to have entered the fierce fray Joe Carter opened up at First Things with criticism of certain aspects of the Front Porch Republic ethos. Carter:

Since 2008, FPR has been a fascinating project. But the fusionism of self-sufficient and freedom-loving localists with monarchists and socialists can’t last forever. Either the various groups will go their separate ways or Porcherism will eventually be dismissed as a bizarre philosophy that has no connection to American life in the twenty-first century. It would be a shame if Porcherism failed. We need an attractive presentation of traditionalism that can inspire the masses, not another fantasy ideology that appeals only to quirky academics.

Carter’s attack makes clear why I find it increasingly difficult to sympathize with conservative defenders of liberalism, who praise mass culture yet fret over socialism, who worry about relativism for a living yet dismiss concerns about uglification as reflecting the mere opinions of elitist aesthetes.  A conservative liberal is somebody who encourages the prevailing progressive view that the past was benighted and is best forgotten, but then demands respect for the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — and to boot casually drops ten-dollar words like “polis” with unintended irony.

Blogging has been light today, and will be light, because I’ve been rather overwhelmed with some great news and am struggling to focus on anything else: today, I (well, my agent) closed a deal for me to do a book about my sister Ruthie, this community, her living and her dying, and my return here. We’re all pretty amazed by this: grateful for the opportunity, and awed by the responsibility. I drove out to the country today to tell Mike, Ruthie’s widower, the good news. We sat on the bed, right where Ruthie slept, and I talked with him about how the story of the good life she led, and the good people who loved her and all of us through her cancer, will now be a major book.

There were tears.

And now the work on the book begins, with prayers that the narrative that all of us involved in telling what happened here these past two years will be worthy of the story and its grace. I have to thank you readers for the interest you have shown all along in Ruthie’s story. It really is an amazing narrative, one that I’m finding through talking to those who knew Ruthie is even richer than I thought. It is going to be a deep and undeserved honor to have the chance to tell it all in full-length narrative, and to shine a light on what any of us can accomplish if we live plainly, with faith, hope, and love. It’s the easiest thing, and the hardest. Ruthie did it. As I can never say often enough: I always knew she was good; I didn’t know she was great.

UPDATE: Just so you have an idea of the kind of story this book is going to tell, the photo above is from the all-night vigil Ruthie’s friends kept at her coffin (which is behind the women) before her funeral. These are some of the women who walked with her throughout her life, especially those last 19 cancer months. It was not a somber vigil, but a time of laughing and storytelling. That’s the kind of town this is. That’s the kind of people who loved Ruthie, and the kind of love she inspired.

Evidence that people are naming their babies after Arianna Huffington.:

But a look at the historical trend suggests Huffington’s fame is exerting an upward pull on her name’s prevalence. According to data for the entire U.S. population gathered by the Social Security Administration, “Arianna” jumped into the top 100 names for girls in 2003, when it debuted at No. 86, up from No. 114 the year before. That was the year Huffington made headlines by running for governor of California. It hovered in the 80′s for three years, then started climbing again after 2005, the year the Huffington Post launched.

Coincidence? Maybe. But probably not entirely, says Murray: “Moms do look for names they feel are strong and intelligent, and they have those wishes for their daughters.”

We’ve been talking in the homeschooling thread below about the perceived wrong of state schoolteachers having to receive by law a high degree of training in their field, but homeschool teachers having to have exactly nothing. Isn’t that wrong? is the complaint. It’s a reasonable objection. A couple of remarks now.

I was in the first class of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a public school for advanced high school juniors and seniors that opened in 1983. LSMSA was the only state school exempted from state requirements mandating an education degree and the usual certification process for teaching. This was visionary, and it couldn’t have been easy to have pulled off politically back in the day, given the power of the teachers union. One of my best professors there was a lawyer who loved history, and discovered he had both a passion and a gift for teaching. He never went through a day of official training. Many of the teachers were academics by training and disposition, but none had to do the state certification routine. I don’t think that hurt our education one bit. In fact, I would argue that it helped it, because the school was free to hire the best teachers it could find, unshackled by guild-like requirements. Just as a journalism degree doesn’t make you a great journalist, an education degree doesn’t make you a great teacher. More on this in a moment.

To be perfectly clear, I don’t think that anybody can teach. I, for one, would be a terrible teacher. I don’t have the temperament for it, or the organizational skills. Plus, I find public speaking, no matter how small the group, to be exhausting. If my children depended on me to be their home instructor … well, we wouldn’t homeschool. No question about it. I would fail them, and fail in my duty to educate them.

My wife, on the other hand, has never taken an education class, but she discovered she has a true gift for it when circumstances resulted in her teaching grammar in our homeschooled co-op. I’ve never actually seen her teach, but a friend of ours, a college professor who is an excellent teacher, told me privately that he’d observed her doing it, and  told me that she’s genuinely gifted. I can see in my children’s academic progress that their mother knows what she’s doing. But if she had my lack of capability, we certainly wouldn’t homeschool. The day may come when she can no longer do for the children what they require, or find and hire someone who can do it (I’m looking at you, calculus), and should that day come, we’ll make the shift. We aren’t ideologues about this.

I think one thing that bothers professionally trained teachers about homeschooling is similar to what irritates professionally trained journalists, such as Your Working Boy, about blogging. True, journalism school can give you the professional training that you need to be a competent journalist, but can’t guarantee that you’ll be good at it. So too with professional training in teaching. Still, the “anybody can do it” attitude that you see among partisans of blogging (and homeschooling) deeply bothers those who have been professionally trained. Part of it is no doubt irrational resentment and fear. If it’s true that you don’t have to have professional training to excel at journalism or elementary and secondary education, then what does that say to we who have spent all that time and money being professionally trained in those fields? Doesn’t it undermine our status, our authority, even our ability to make a living? You can see where the anxiety comes from.

But the justifiable part, I think, is that the average Joe often doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. I read some news-oriented blogs written by non-professional journalists and wonder why on earth you never see writing and analysis that good in newspapers. But I read other blogs and am grateful for the methodical training and temperament that go into the craft of journalism. I can easily imagine this is true for the teaching profession as well. The problem is professional journalists (like me) and professional teachers often have a guild-like mentality that regards our professions as quasi-sacramental, in the sense that ordination is required for effective service. It’s just not true. On the other hand, it is manifestly not the case that anybody who thinks they can do what we do really can. This is why it’s unwise to make blanket statements about both journalism and teaching, and the kind of people who should be allowed (“allowed”) to practice either.

To repeat my point, because I want to be perfectly clear: One blanket statement I do think accurate is that the conferring of a university degree does not make a true journalist, or a true teacher, and it doesn’t serve journalism, or teaching, or society, to live by this shibboleth. But, balance: it’s not true either that just anybody can do these things, and it’s foolish and self-aggrandizing to think so. It demeans both vocation of journalism and the vocation of teaching, and the importance of both to society, to take either mistaken view as truth. That’s a statement that will satisfy passionate folks on either side of the issue, but I think it’s true all the same.

I’m not the Ron Paul enthusiast that Daniel McCarthy is, but I think he’s onto something in speculating that Ron Paul represents some sort of future for the GOP. Excerpt:

More significant than the overall percentage Paul claimed last night, however, is the 48 percent he won of the under-30 vote. This augurs more than just a change in the factional balance within the GOP. It’s suggestive of a generational realignment in American politics. The fact that many of these young people do not consider themselves Republican is very much the point: Paul’s detractors cite that as a reason to discount them, but what it really means is that the existing ideological configuration of U.S. politics doesn’t fit the rising generation. They’re not Republicans, but they’re voting in a Republican primary: at one time, that same description applied to Southerners, social conservatives, and Reagan Democrats, groups that were not part of the traditional GOP coalition and whose participation completely remade the party.

There’s more at stake here than the future of the Republican Party, though. The style as well as substance of Ron Paul’s movement is radically different from the 1990s right, and the substance itself is different not only in terms of what Paul’s supporters want but what their priorities are.

As Daniel goes on to say, the issues that defined post-1960s conservatism just don’t matter all that much to young people today. Paul is too old to be around to take advantage of the shift, which will take some time to play out. It seems all but impossible today to imagine a party as ideologically rigid as the present-day GOP making any kind of meaningful change. But it’s coming. And it’s coming to the Democratic Party too. As Daniel points out, both left and right in America organized themselves around the same issues these past 40 years. Barack Obama campaigned as a change agent, but he’s governed like a conventional Democrat.

What’s hard to see right now is what the main issues defining US politics, left and right, will be. What do you think? It seems obvious that the economy will be far more important, and on a number of levels, than it has been — but neither left nor right today seems to have the slightest idea how to meet the structural challenges facing us. Foreign and defense policy will surely be determined by the relative lack of money … but in what ways? Cultural issues will no doubt continue to be important … but which ones, and why? Most people understand that the question of same-sex marriage is a lost cause for social conservatives, but I believe that the directly related, indeed subsequent, question of religious freedom in an era of gay civil rights is going to be a big cultural and political issue in the decade or two to come.

Other thoughts? I’m thinking that relative scarcity is going to force people to re-establish community ties that had been strained or severed thanks to the freedom and mobility that money bought for many of us. We may have a more localist future because the federal government will not be able to do nearly as much for us.