Wow. Some days I can not avoid ugly thoughts.

I wrote about an ugly thought I had concerning Rick Santorum's odd assertions about the family; to wit:

It's weird how social conservatives sometimes have ideas that lead one to absurd places if drawn out to a logical end. Over the course of this campaign, former Senator Rick Santorum has made two assertions that I've found personally appalling: the first one being that even a woman and a man in prison might be preferable as parents to a gay couple, and the second being that a woman who was impregnated through rape should just make the best of a bad situation.

Separately, those notions are nasty enough. Taken together, however, can one assume that Rick Santorum would find that a rape victim, her rapist, and the child of that rape, are a less-dysfunctional family unit than a family headed by a law-abiding, committed, consensual gay couple? And that, whether he's inside of prison or outside of prison, the child of such a union benefits from having a rapist father in his or her life?

As it occurs, George Will has written a column regarding the importance of fathers in influencing their children's lives.  Here's a sample:

Born to an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute, he acquired his interest in driving from his grandfather, who would drive around the block with Sugar Bear in his lap. Not until Sugar Bear was 25 did he learn that his grandfather was his father, too, having had a sexual relationship with Sugar Bear’s mother.

         (Snip)

This is the preoccupation of Ken Canfield, 58, a Kansas State Ph.D. who, until five years ago, headed the National Center for Fathering in Kansas City. He then moved here to help Pepperdine University develop a Center for the Family, and he now labors with World Impact living among the city’s most troubled people. Canfield acquainted Sugar Bear with Psalm 68, which speaks of God as “father of the fatherless” who “setteth the solitary in families.” For people like Sugar Bear, people with holes in their souls never filled by the love of fathers, Canfield says religion offers the “spiritualization of fatherhood”:
“If you don’t have the calm self-respect that a father gives, your passions go sideways. For a number of men, their passions become sexualized as they look for comfort and affirmation of their manhood.”

See what happened there? And yet, Sugar Bear's mother's life apparently did not lack from an impactful relationship with her father. Apparently.  And yet she was, in Will's words, "an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute".  It would make you wonder, if you weren't more inclined to realize that this means that the old man raped his daughter and she would have been, therefore, very unlikely to marry the father of her child, and that being raped by one's father probably does not contribute to a very healthy psyche.

And somehow, Sugar Bear's troubled life had to do with fatherlessness.

It isn't when I don't understand social conservatives that I feel angry--it's when I think I do.