OK, one more thing about Rick Santorum, if you'll bear with me:

Yesterday BuzzFlash linked an article Santorum wrote for Catholic Online in July 2002, when sexual abuse by priests was page-one news. Read the entire article, by all means, if you want to be reminded that pleasure-abhorring theocrats are roughly similar the world over, whether they wear turbans or crucifixes -- but I want to point out one sentence that stuck in my craw:

While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

This is a disgusting distortion of the truth.

The New York Times reported two and a half months before Santorum's column appeared that there really wasn't a "center" of this scandal:

At least 177 priests suspected of molesting minors have either resigned or been taken off duty in 28 states and the District of Columbia since the clerical sex scandal erupted in January, a nationwide review of Roman Catholic dioceses by The Associated Press found.

The review also showed that in 18 other states, where priests have not been taken off the job, dioceses still have responded to the crisis in a variety of ways. They include turning over allegations to prosecutors, scouring personnel records to see whether old claims were properly handled, and reviewing and publicizing policies for handling complaints.

In the end, the review found only four states -- Arkansas, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming -- where the scandal seems to have had no impact on the way the church operates.

"Priest Scandals Expand Nationwide" was the headline of a Cincinnati Enquirer article at about the same time.

Boston wasn't the epicenter of the problem. Boston was the epicenter of the response to the problem.

And it wasn't the conservative Boston Herald or right-wing talk radio that exposed sexual abuse by priests -- as I noted a few days ago, at least one Herald columnist (quoted here) flogged the right-wing's line that most of the abuse wasn't really pedophilia because it involved post-pubescent boys. No -- it was the liberal-leaning Boston Globe, a paper detested by conservatives, that forced the issue of sexual abuse by priests onto the national agenda.

Rick Santorum could have acknowedged that. He didn't, of course -- bashing liberal coastal cities is considered an exquisite pleasure on the right, and, naturally, he couldn't resist (though I'm sure it was deeply disappointing to him that the most thorough exposure of pedophile priests didn't take place in New York, Hollywood, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C., the cities that are the most enjoyable targets of right-wing contempt).