Freedom of independence!

Album cover by Micah Buzan.

I just want to keep savoring that bit of word salad for a while as created in a collaborative effort by Rick Santorum, reporter Michael D. Shear, and a shamefully inattentive Times copy editor:

“It’s not about contraception,” Mr. Santorum said. “It’s about economic liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of liberty. It’s about government control of your lives, and it’s got to stop.” [In fact, as noted in the previous post, the Times report is incorrect: Santorum said "freedom of religion", not "freedom of liberty".]

In the first place, if "it" is the government proposal for having health insurance plans cover contraception, exactly how is it not about contraception but is about freedom of speech?

Is it a new definition of speech, like the way in Buckley v. Valeo money is speech, [jump]
so that here spermatozoa would be speech, transmitting a message of some kind that the barrier method prevents them from completing? But then that would be about contraception too.

Or is the freedom of speech that of the bishops, who want to tell everybody they can't use contraception? But surely they can say whatever they want—they just can't enforce it. Or is enforcement yet another kind of speech, peculiar to bishops?

Or is it the bishops' money that talks? But in that case being forced to pay for contraception would be a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights, not First, the right to keep financially silent... And I still haven't thought of an account that doesn't have the word "contraception" in it. Any suggestions?

And then "freedom of liberty". Santorum did not actually say it, but amazingly enough (thanks, Professor Google!), it's been used before.

Wikipedia uses it as the key element in the definition of "detention":

Detention is the process when a state, government or citizen lawfully holds a person by removing their freedom of liberty at that time.

You can see straight away that this is not your finest Wikipedia prose—indeed the editors have some complaints, and I could suggest some more, like, is it really only detention if it's lawful? (Sounds like a Dick Cheney theory: Detention is always lawful.) And what on earth is that "at that time" doing there? Is this a cop's report? I did learn something sort of cool—that the Obama administration has eliminated the term "unlawful enemy combatant" (in favor of "alien unprivileged enemy belligerents", which is admittedly far from ringing—naturally, as a liberal, I find it draws me to worrying about underprivileged enemy belligerents, but that's another story, or not a story at all). But I don't feel I have to sit down and work out what the author meant.

"The Freedom of Liberty" is the title of a paper by one Stein Ringen (Society 42/4, 2006) whose abstract (Ebsco doesn't give access to the whole paper) says among other things that

There are two ways that a person's choices may not be his own. One is that they are dictated to him by someone else who has the power to oblige him to obey. The other is that choices, although not imposed upon him or forbidden to him by an outside dictator, emerge through psychological processes which are for him a mystery so that what he do in life is to satisfy desires he just happen to have.

This just suggests that Society's editor has trouble saying no.

A "conservative blogger, a part time writer and a frequent 'letter to the editor guy'" rejoicing in the nom de blogue of Utah frequently quotes himself as having once written that

Modern conservatism is about “freedom of“, as in freedom of opportunity, freedom of self-determination, freedom of liberty, freedom of religion. “Progressives” define it as “freedom from“, freedom from economic, political and social risk and freedom from religion. The conservative approach requires minimal regulation and control, the “progressive” requires maximum regulation and control.

This is authentically the same impulse as that which animates Santorum, and you know what? I don't think it means anything at all. Which doesn't mean, by the way, that it isn't dangerous: indeed it could be the most meaningless phrases that cause the greatest harm.