Rick Santorum's America.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - It Takes a Family - Book Review

Just so you don't have to, I actually read Rick Santorum's entire new book, It Takes a Family. Santorum, the conservative, pro-life Republican from Pennsylvania, is up for reelection in one of the most closely watched Senate races of 2006. His opponent, conservative, pro-life Democrat Bob Casey, the Pennsylvania state treasurer, has pulled into a double-digit lead. But Santorum has a strong operation and has come from behind before. He is a national leader of the cultural conservative movement. Thus, his Senate race, his rumored Presidential ambitions, and his current book tour are a kind of barometer of rightwing Christian popularity.

In It Takes a Family (the title is a not-so-subtle jab at Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village), Santorum shows how, in his view, liberals have seized control of every' facet of our national life. It's illuminating to see the whole unified theory laid out.

Santorum describes what leftwingers used to call the Establishment--the people who run the nation's universities, schools, cultural institutions, media, "some big business," "some big labor unions," "and of course the biggest Big of all, the federal government"--as one giant liberal cabal he calls "the village elders" or "the Bigs."

The struggle for the soul of the country comes down to a battle of "the Littles"--churches, civic groups, "and the greatest thorn in the liberals' side, the iconoclastic traditional family"--against the power-mad advocates of welfare, public education, infanticide, and gay marriage.

"The shock troops of the village elders are now battering at the gates of the fortress of marriage," he writes. "The gates will not long hold. The fortress is but a few years away--at most!--of being laid to ruin, unless we, like the apparently doomed warriors at Helms Deep in the movie The Two Towers, make that last charge against the foe."

As I was reading this breathless passage, I happened to look up at my lesbian neighbors' perfectly manicured lawn. These neighbors are as cheerful about my kids' frequent forays onto their property as they are fastidious about their yard maintenance. I imagined for a moment gathering my family and huddling in the house, as Santorum describes, against the unseen threat they supposedly pose to us. First, I'd have to drag my toddler out of their flowerbed, where she goes to greet their garden gnomes every day. Then I'd have to chase my four-year-old away from her rapt observations of their lawn mowing. My children...