This thoughtful article caught my eye, and I should give it some brief consideration. Santorum bases much of his thought on concepts of natural law. The natural law tradition is a great and important tradition. Indeed, even the great positivist legal hphilosopher H.L.A. Hart brings it in the back door in his work The Concept of Law. In the Catholic Church, the article notes, naturual law came in recent times (by Church standards!) to serve as a preferred philosophical model. When you think of it, it allows us to consider what is "natural" as the guide to what is moral. Fine, so far. Unfortunately, what is "natural" becomes preferred over what is human (varied cultural practices). Thus, somehow, homosexuality, which seems nearly universal and in many cases perhaps genetic (which is a tricky question in itself, but certainly beyond individual choice), gets defined out of "natural", while celibacy--quite unnatural to my mind--gets defined in. (If God hadn't wanted us to engage in sex, God wouldn't have given us so much ganas (as we high school Spanish students dubbed it). (I will spare you the other colorful terms that we can dub this phenomena--you choose.)
So while natural law gave some good directions, and it proved of use in the Middle Ages (it allowed Aristotle in the back door), it was left behind for a reason, reasons that seem lost on Rick Santorum, among others.
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