Rick Santorum and "Human Dignity"

Rick Santorum's friends like to say that even if he sometimes seems a little whacky about birth control and the like, he does so from a deep commitment to the sanctity of human life. Rich Lowry:

Although his critics will never credit him for it, Santorum’s social conservatism brings with it an unstinting devotion to human dignity, a touchstone for the former senator. 

Jennifer Rubin:

This should come as no surprise if one understands Santorum’s worldview. Everything stems from his allegiance to the Catholic Church’s teachings that every human life has equal value and dignity. 

Except that, as Andrew Sullivan points out, Santorum is a devoted advocate of war and torture:

It seems to me that no politician who has aggressively defended these core violations of human dignity can be described as someone for whom human dignity is a "touchstone" of his worldview. The effrontery is not that of the media; the effrontery is from Santorum when he lectured John McCain that McCain

doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.

In that very defense - in Santorum's own description of what he is defending - he is defending the "breaking" of a human person, made in the image of God. He is defending a core, absolute evil. Let us concede for the sake of argument that these are "enhanced interrogation techniques" and not "torture", as Santorum insists. There is no meaningful difference between the two whatsoever from a Catholic perspective, and Santorum's public positioning as an avowedly Catholic politician, while defending and promoting an absolute evil, is a true and immense moral scandal - in the Church's sense of the word.

In last night's debate Santorum reiterated that we would go to war to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Anyone who thinks that the using birth control is a more serious affront to human dignity than torture, or than blowing people apart with bunker-busting bombs, has serious problems of both morals and logic.