Its all Joseph Nye and Howard Zinn's fault...

or so Senator Rick "High Pitched Rich" Santorum reasons over at Catholics On-line.
Therein, the Junior Senator from Pennsylvania states in respect of the clerical sex abuse scandal in the Boston Dioceses:
It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. 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.

Now I could point out that sadly, clerical sex abuse is a world wide phenom, something that has happened in rural New Hampshire as well as Tampa Florida and points beyond. I could do that...yadda yadda yadda.
But what would be the point?
Rick won't listen, a profound truculent ignorance lies at the core of his ideology....how else could he ever satisfy modern conservatism's first commandment "thou shalt blame the liberals in all cases no matter what"?

No, his line of reasoning interests me because it is so decadent and eloquent of declinism. Essentially, what Senator Santorum is proposing that when a religious leader indulges in forbidden carnality with children...it is society's fault!
This is the sort of naive' elitist reasoning that we haven't heard since the palmier days of New York Mayor John Lindsay.
By blaming American society, Santorum takes the heat off his beloved catholic clergy and like Abbie Hoffman or a young Jane Fonda can now condemn the very culture that has nurtured and protected him all his natural life.
If this line of reasoning didn't work for the Weathermen and the SDS in 1969, why then should it be credible for today's rightical chic agitators?
Rick has never known an hour's worth of oppression in his entire miserable life, certainly none that he couldn't call a cab to escape if he so desired. These wowsers have long forgotten that they live in the free-est nation on earth for religious believers. No Santorum et al want to force us all to live in something they think is better than freedom, that being theocracy. Hence their entirey preposterous but also dangerous sense of greivance.
They are mad, not because society is so decadent, but because it hasn't surrendered to them yet.