IT'S CALLED "A FOLLOW-UP QUESTION," MICHAEL

Excerpts from Michael Sokolove's godawful profile/wet kiss of Rick Santorum in today's New York Times Magazine -- and questions that he somehow never got around to asking the Rickster:

When I asked him if he viewed gay marriage as a threat to his own marriage, he answered quickly. "Yes, absolutely," he said. "It threatens my marriage. It threatens all marriages. It threatens the traditional values of this country."

Really? In what way exactly?

In 1999, the family received a malpractice award after Karen Santorum sued a chiropractor in Virginia. She testified that she sought treatment for back pain after childbirth in 1996 and suffered a ruptured disk from an improperly administered spinal manipulation. Santorum has been a vocal critic of large malpractice awards and has backed measures to limit damages. Karen Santorum asked for $500,000 and was awarded $350,000 by a jury. A judge finally reduced the award to $175,000, of which Santorum said they received about $75,000 after their lawyer took his share. "I'm not against all lawsuits," Santorum said. "I think they're appropriate where the case warrants it, and this one did. It was not frivolous."

Yes, and isn't it the job of judges and juries to determine which ones are and aren't frivolous, not rabble-rousing politicians?

"The whole idea of funding people of faith is not just to provide good human services," he told me. "It's also to provide good human services with that additional touch, if you will, with that aspect of healing that comes through that spiritual interaction. If you talk to folks who are out there on the front lines fighting these battles in the neighborhoods, this is an intricate part of turning lives around, particularly in people who have really hit the bottom. You find very few who rise back up without some element of something bigger that's helping them. You can't ignore the importance of the spiritual part of someone's life and say you're going to solve their problems. You're throwing good money after bad."

So when you assert categorically that "You find very few who rise back up without some element of something bigger that's helping them," I assume you have some evidence to back that up. What is it?