How can gay monogamy be the end of the family?

He's a professional, no doubt about it, but he often looks to me as nervous as an amateur, as prone to be upset, as anxious for approval. There's something genuine there - genuinely awful, if you will (and I will), but genuine nonetheless, something to respond to.

He's a fully paid-up, consistent and Catholic conservative, whose views on sexual matters are probably not that much different from those of St Thomas Aquinas (anything not procreative is of the Devil). The horror at same-sex relations identifies private behaviour as a threat to the state, sodomy much the same as bestiality. If you are going to have gay marriage, he says, what's to stop society moving on to the next step - polygamy?

Sometimes, in a bemused way, his critics wonder why, indeed, polygamy should be anathema. The Old Testament seems to describe a world in which polygamy was far from unknown. Why not give it a whirl again, along with animal sacrifice and other practices inexplicably expunged from the pick-and-choose Jewish-Christian tradition?

But for gay Americans there is something more perverse and dishonest about the what-next-polygamy? argument. It is that what gays of this generation are asking for is monogamy - along with all the civil recognition and legal protection it enjoys. Santorum affects to think it an argument against people asking for monogamy that, having won that right, they will go on to demand polygamy.

It appears to be one of life's little ironies that gay people who want to give up or avoid a life of promiscuity, make their own households and have their own families, are identified as a threat to the family itself. But public opinion in the States is changing in favour of same-sex marriage, and the Santorums of this world are holding out against the trend. Does gay marriage threaten Santorum's marriage? "Yes, absolutely," he told the New York Times, "it threatens my marriage. It threatens all marriages. It threatens the traditional values of this country."

Then there is the passionate fight around the issue of abortion, and the attempt by conservatives to bring the Republican Party, and with it the state as a whole, strictly into line with Catholic doctrine on birth control. If you want the next general election to be fought on this issue, Santorum is very much your man.

It's hard to talk about this without mentioning what obviously belongs to the world of private grief, but has struck people rather forcefully and affected public debate. In 1996 his wife Karen developed an intrauterine infection and a fever of nearly 105 degrees. She already knew that the baby she had been carrying for 20 weeks had a defect and would not survive outside the womb. According to the New York Times again, she allowed the doctors to give her Picotin to speed the birth. The baby lived only two hours.

The paper goes on: "What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish - others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them.

"The next day they took him home. 'Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!' Karen writes in [Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum], which takes the form of letter to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. 'Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, "This is my baby brother Gabriel. He is an angel".'"

Apparently this practice, though unusual at the time and "no longer recommended", was once favoured as a way of establishing the reality of the dead child in the minds of the bereaved family. This theme continues in the present electoral contest. The family's youngest child, born when her mother was 48, has a serious genetic disorder. Recently Santorum took time off from campaigning to be at her bedside. The child recovered.

Some months ago, when the Tea Party was still new, there was a theory that, whatever their personal convictions, the Tea-Partiers would make it their priority to put fiscal responsibility first. Family values, the attack on Darwinism and other social priorities would be not dropped but treated as a separate issue. The thing to do right now was cut spending, end irresponsible borrowing, balance budgets without raising taxes.

That turns out to have been an illusionary hope (for those for whom it was indeed a hope). In the current phase, abortion and family planning are back in play, Romney is being reviled by Newt Gingrich (even as Gingrich seems suddenly to shrink) as a Massachusetts liberal, Ron Paul is offering something that goes very far beyond plain fiscal responsibility - isolationism and the retreat from empire.

Republicans are faced with two distinct questions. Whom do you want as your candidate? (Who is most congenial to you as a personality?) and Who do you think can win against Obama? The story is changing. Unemployment is coming down. One state that hardly expected to has found itself with a hefty budgetary surplus. The auto industry is on the mend. Obama's ratings are improving. Who do you want to represent you now? The longer the question is deferred, the more the conservatives are put on the spot. They are running short of options. What looks like panic sets in. They change their minds. Okay, they say, not Gingrich Santorum! That's what they say this week. But those of us who watch, transfixed, as they deal with the quandary of their own making are learning not to believe too much of what they say.