The Personal and the Political

Ross Douthat writes today about the weird little controversy that flared up last week around the death of Rick Santorum's premature son. (He took the dead fetus home to let his other children “absorb and understand that they had a brother” before burying it.) From the inanity of these complaints about how another persona handles the loss of an infant, Douthat extracts an important lesson:

In a sense, one could say that these kinds of invasive debates become inevitable once the traditional zone of privacy around public figures collapses. But it would be more accurate to say that the zone of privacy has collapsed precisely because of the deep moral divisions that these kinds of controversies reveal. Privacy is a luxury of moral consensus.

Exactly.  In a society where everything about family life is done in the established way, or as dictated by priests or shamans who are agreed to be experts in such matters, nobody thinks choices made in private life have political meaning. But when matters like divorce and abortion are among the leading bones of political contention, private choices come to have political consequences.

In our society, little about marriage is a given. Marriage seems even to have swelled in importance to us as communities of neighborhood, class and church have weakened, and the choices we make in marriage now define who we are as much as anything else we do. When we ask, "Who is this person?" an answer like "a working class Catholic from Pittsburgh" is not very satisfying. In particular, that answer tells us nothing about this person's politics. A question like "Did he or she abort a fetus with Down's Syndrome?" seems to us much more informative. So we squabble in print about things that are really none of our business, and judge politicians by things that have little to do with the kind of policies they would support. We just don't know how else to get a handle on who people are.