Justice & Law Quote by Rick Santorum

Santorum is trying to make a coercive idea sound like common sense: that government restraint is not an intrusion, but a form of moral housekeeping. The key move is his substitution of "rights" for "power". States don't literally have rights in the human sense; they have authority granted and limited by constitutions. By calling that authority a "right", he smuggles in a moral entitlement to regulate desire itself, not just harmful conduct.

The phrase "wants and passions" is doing heavy cultural work. It's not about zoning laws or tax rates; it's a coded bundle of anxieties about sex, marriage, porn, drugs, and the broader post-60s storyline of personal freedom. He frames liberty as indulgence, "letting people live out whatever" they feel, which positions the permissive state as naive and the restrictive state as the only adult in the room.

The subtext is communitarian and religious without naming either: individuals are not primarily sovereign choosers but members of a social order that can be damaged by private behavior. "Consequences" is the rhetorical trump card - a vague, elastic word that can mean anything from public health costs to moral decay to divine judgment, allowing listeners to project their preferred harms onto the argument.

Contextually, this sits in the American culture-war tradition that treats the state as both referee and parent, especially when the topic is sexuality. Santorum isn't merely disagreeing with libertarianism; he's reasserting a vision of citizenship where the state polices the boundary between freedom and sin, then calls it protection.