If his campaign can’t be defined by his stance on either contraception or unemployment, what’s the rationale for Santorum’s marathon and increasingly long-shot candidacy? Cheering on a Christian theocracy, and then quickly backpedaling, is as close as I can get. Dennis Terry’s hysterical remarks should be chilling to anyone who values religious freedom, on the right or left (watch it here). Watching Santorum standing and clapping for the bigot made it more clear than ever that he can never lead this nation. The fact that he later backtracked and (sort of) said he disagreed with Terry’s remarks doesn’t erase the fact that when he heard them, he stood and clapped like all the other good Christians. This is the company Santorum keeps.

The right-wing Catholic’s claim that his political enemies are keeping the contraception issue alive has always been specious, but it was particularly strange to watch him try to hang Scarborough with that agenda, too. The “Morning Joe” host, along with colleague Mika Brzezinski, admitted their show has featured a lot of criticism of Santorum’s extremism on contraception, and they gave the candidate a chance to reply. Santorum insisted that the only issue he cares about is the “violation of the First Amendment” represented by President Obama’s requirement that insurance companies offer cost-free contraception. When Scarborough pushed a bit, pointing to a video interview five months ago in Iowa, in which Santorum said he’d be the only presidential candidate to talk about contraception and called it “not OK,” Santorum insisted, “I wasn’t talking about access to contraception … I was talking about the breakdown of the nuclear family.”

But even after Scarborough and Brzezinski agreed to leave the issue, Santorum couldn’t let it go, accusing them of trying to “pigeonhole” and “stereotype” him. Scarborough hit back, asking his former House GOP colleague: “Do you think I’m trying to pigeonhole you and stereotype you?” noting they had much the same stance on social issues when in Congress.

“Well, yeah, you keep bringing it up,” a sulky Santorum replied. The MSNBC host wasn’t having it.  ”I was ready to move on, and you said I was trying to pigeonhole and stereotype you … I have no reason for doing that.”

It was fun TV.

But even as Santorum was insisting the media kept the contraception issue alive to “stereotype” him and ignore important issues, he told an Illinois audience “I don’t care what the unemployment rate is going to be. It doesn’t matter to me. My campaign doesn’t hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates.” He then went into a long digression about how Romney’s professing to care about unemployment means he’s not a conservative, because a real conservative doesn’t believe the president has anything to do with unemployment. Then why have he and all the GOP candidates attacked Obama for high unemployment – at least until the rate began coming down? I know, it makes no sense. But now we know Santorum doesn’t care about contraception or unemployment, supposedly. The rationale for his candidacy wanes.

His low point, though, came Sunday night, when he stood and clapped while Rev. Dennis Terry gave one of the most bigoted speeches of the entire campaign – and that includes some of the humdingers the various backers of Gov. Rick Perry delivered last summer. Terry told Santorum’s Louisiana audience:

I don’t care what the liberals say, I don’t care what the naysayers say, this nation was founded as a Christian nation…There is only one God and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words.. Listen to me, If you don’t love America, If you don’t like the way we do things I have one thing to say – GET OUT. We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah, we worship God, we worship God’s son Jesus Christ.

What a bigoted loon. When reporters asked Santorum whether he agreed with Terry’s spew, he formed a pretzel, and seemed to repudiate it convolutedly. Here’s how the New York Times parsed it:

“If the question is, do I agree with his statement that America shouldn’t do that?” Mr. Santorum asked in response to the reporters’ questions. “No, if he was speaking for himself he’s obviously allowed to believe what he wants to believe but, obviously I believe in freedom of religion and all religions are welcome and should be. I think I’ve made that pretty clear throughout my campaign that I believe very much in freedom of religion, and folks should be able to worship whoever they want to worship and bring their thoughts in the public square.”

The other big news in GOP politics today was the continuing unfolding reaction to Sen. John McCain repudiating the Republican “war on women” Sunday on “Meet the Press.” Excuse me if I’m not fully grateful for McCain’s allegedly brave stance. The man professed to believe that women have the right to their own decisions on contraception, but didn’t mention that he voted for the Blunt Amendment, which would have given employers the right to deny contraception coverage if they didn’t approve of it – in fact, to deny coverage of any treatment they personally disdained. What hypocrisy.

I talked about the day’s GOP unraveling with Bill Burton on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.”

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If one were prone to uncritical acceptance of political rhetoric, it would be easy to assume from Santorum’s remarks that the Obama administration isn’t prosecuting child porn. In all of his statements about smut, the GOP candidate is always careful to bring it back to the children. Santorum takes no care to clearly define what the threat to children is, exactly – whether it’s that they might be forced into illegal underage porn or that they might happen upon adult material online. The conflation of adult pornographers with child pornographers is a classic anti-smut move, much as child sex trafficking gets uncritically folded into debates about consensual adult sex work.

Let’s be clear here: The Obama administration continues to prosecute child pornography just as the Bush administration did. The real change is in obscenity prosecutions involving consenting adults: As I’ve written about before, the Obama administration hasn’t put a priority on these cases. Three holdover cases from the Bush years have been prosecuted, and to pathetic ends: a plea bargain with no prison time, a dismissal and, most recently, a mistrial. It’s hard to see how those cases – the very best the Department of Justice could find – were a good use of taxpayers’ dollars.

Presumably, hopefully, Santorum understands the distinction between child porn and adult porn, obscenity law and child pornography law, but he’s using ambiguity here to help his case. The truth is that the prosecution of adult obscenity cases — which are nowhere near as legally clear-cut as he suggests — has very little to do with children. If his concern is about kids being able to find adult material online, he could propose stricter access laws. What he’s really after, though, is making consensual, adult porn to which he morally objects disappear. Children just make for a much better excuse.

Why has Santorum avoided Carmel Catholic? Well, it’s a college prep school that boasts “respect for diversity, mutual growth and development.” A full 99 percent of its graduates go to college, and a quarter pursue science degrees, so they presumably don’t share Santorum’s belief that college is for “snobs” (nor his interest in the “intelligent design” theory of creation.)

Herman, it should be noted, is a politically active Democrat. But he’s not alone in finding Santorum a poor representative for Carmel Catholic. Recently, other grads organized “Carmel Catholic Alumni Against Rick Santorum” on Facebook. Carrying signs with slogans like, “Catholics Against Hate,” “Carmel Catholic Alumni for Equality,” and “No to Santorum, Yes to Equality,” they protested his Friday speech in Arlington Heights.

“True Christians live the love of Jesus Christ. They don’t preach hate and discrimination,” said Kelly O’Connor, a 1996 Carmel graduate. “Rick Santorum has really built a career on discriminating against the LGBT community,” said Matt Muchowski, the protest organizer and a 2002 Carmel Catholic High School graduate. “That’s the thing that’s really rallying alumni against him. We’ve been shocked and embarrassed by it.”

With Mitt Romney claiming Michigan, New Hampshire and Massachusetts among his home bases, you’d think Santorum would make a big deal about his high school alma mater during a tough primary battle in Illinois. But maybe Santorum realizes what the mainstream media seems not to: Catholics are far more liberal than Santorum, and they’re not flocking to his candidacy. Santorum is still doing better in Illinois that anyone expected, but not with fellow Carmel Catholic alums.

While the practice of home schooling is new to many people, my own interest in it was sparked nearly 20 years ago. I was a socially awkward adolescent with a chaotic family life, and became close to a conservative Christian home-schooling family that seemed perfect in every way. Through my connection to this family, I was introduced to a whole world of conservative Christian home-schoolers, some of whom we would now consider “Quiverfull” families: home-schooling conservatives who eschew any form of family planning and choose instead to “trust God” with matters related to procreation.

Though I fell out of touch with my home-schooled friends as we grew older, a few years ago, I reconnected with a few ex-Quiverfull peers on a new support blog called No Longer Quivering. Poring over their stories, I was shocked to find so many tales of gross educational neglect. I don’t merely mean that they had received what I now view as an overly politicized education with huge gaps, for example, in American history, evolution or sexuality. Rather, what disturbed me were the many stories about home-schoolers who were barely literate when they graduated, or whose math and science education had never extended much past middle school.

Take Vyckie Garrison, an ex-Quiverfull mother of seven who, in 2008, enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching them at home. Garrison, who started the No Longer Quivering blog, says her near-constant pregnancies – which tended to result either in miscarriages or life-threatening deliveries – took a toll on her body and depleted her energy. She wasn’t able to devote enough time and energy to home schooling to ensure a quality education for each child. And she says the lack of regulation in Nebraska, where the family lived, “allowed us to get away with some really shoddy home schooling for a lot of years.”

“I’ll admit it,” she confesses. “Because I was so overwhelmed with my life… It was a real struggle to do the basics, so it didn’t take long for my kids to fall far behind. One of my daughters could not read at 11 years old.”

At the time, Garrison was taking parenting advice from Quiverfull leaders who deemphasized academic achievement in favor of family values. She remembers one Quiverfull leader saying, “If they can do mathematics perfectly but they have no morals, you have failed them.”

The implication, she says, was that, “if they’re not doing so well academically, well, then they can catch up on that later. It’s not such a big deal. It was a really convenient way of thinking for me because I wasn’t able to keep up anyway.” This kind of rhetoric, Garrison notes, provided a “high-minded justification for educational neglect. I would not have gotten away with that if I’d had to get my kids tested every year.”

Over time, Garrison lost faith in her fundamentalist ideology and became aware that her children’s education was being neglected. Eventually all but one of her six younger children ended up entering and excelling in the public school system.

Why did she stick with home schooling for so long, despite her difficulties? “We were convinced that it would be better for our kids not to have an education than to be educated to become humanists or atheists and to reject God,” Garrison says. “We became so isolated because the Quiverfull lifestyle was so overwhelming we didn’t have time or energy for socialization. So the only people we knew were exactly like us. We were told that the whole point of public school was to dumb down the children and turn them into compliant workers – to brainwash them and indoctrinate them into this godless way of thinking.”

Garrison believes that home schooling has become so popular with fundamentalist Christians because, “there is an atmosphere of real terror among some evangelicals. They are horrified by the fact that Obama is president, and they see the New Atheist movement as a vocal, in-your-face threat. Plus, they are obsessed with the End Times, and believe that the Apocalypse could happen any day now… They see a demon on every corner.

“We home-schooled because we wanted to protect our children from what we viewed as the total secularization of America. We listened to people like Rush Limbaugh, who told us that America was in the clutches of evil liberal feminist atheists.”

*

Just how common are stories like Vyckie Garrison’s? Unfortunately, it’s hard to know. The federal government only maintains very broad demographic statistics about home-schoolers in this country; federal data only keeps track of what kinds of people are home schooling and why. You can find plenty of information about home-schoolers according to race, family income or highest education obtained by the parents. But as regards neglect related to home schooling? The government cannot tell you — and there is no systematic state-by-state record of the percentage of truancy convictions (possibly the best measure of educational neglect at present) that involve home-schooling families versus those involving enrolled students and/or their parents.

Capturing that kind of data is essential to understanding the scope of this problem, but getting real numbers will always be complicated by the fact that many home-schooling families choose not to comply with the law by submitting to state home-school regulations, or even report their home-school activity to the state. While it’s possible that some forget, others intentionally fail to report because they fear too much government intervention in their lives. For many conservative Christians, this is a key aspect of their decision not to report.

Given the scarcity of numbers on this issue, the best one can hope for at this point is anecdotal information about the problem. But because home schooling is such a highly politicized issue, it is often difficult to get a clear sense of what is happening from home-schooling parents themselves. And because many parents see themselves as advocates of home schooling, they are not always very eager to discuss potential gaps in home-schooling education.

Luckily, more than a few adult home-school graduates are eager to talk. And as I talk to more and more people who recount first-person stories of home-school-related neglect, it becomes hard to write off what home-school advocates would call “exceptions” simply as fringe outliers.

Erika Diegel Martin’s story is particularly haunting. A home-schooling graduate of the mid-1990s, and an ex-Quiverfull daughter I have known for many years, Diegel Martin was pulled out of public school at 14. Because she was old enough to remember several years of public schooling, she says she never really believed her parents’ dire warnings about it. Her younger brothers were another story. “When the school bus would come by, my youngest brother would go, ‘There goes the prison bus.’ Our parents had them believing that public schools were these horrible places, just dens of iniquity.”

The narrative about public schools, she says, went something like this: “How would you like to get stuck in a building with no light – and secular, godless, atheist teachers for seven hours of the day without even being able to see your parents or go out to play?” As a result, she says, “My brothers were terrified of the public schools.”

Like Garrison, Diegel Martin recounts notable educational gaps in her own family, where there was little academic encouragement. One of her brothers decided to quit school at 16 and faced no parental opposition. The youngest, Diegel Martin says, ceased his formal education at the age of 12, when she left home and was no longer available to teach him herself. And though she was fortunate enough to receive sex education before leaving public school, her siblings were not so lucky. Their parents never taught the three other children about sex, and Diegel Martin remembers giving her 21-year-old sister “the talk” the week before she got married. She also had to intervene to ensure that her younger brothers learned about sex.

As for herself, when she completed her schooling, she says her parents did not allow her to obtain her GED as proof of high school graduation. Their reason? “The girls weren’t allowed to get a GED because we were told we wouldn’t need it. It would open up opportunities that were forbidden to us. We would work in the family business until we got married, and then become homemakers.

“When I talked about wanting to go to college, my parents said, ‘Well, you’re a girl. You don’t go to college.’”

Melinda Palmer, 29, is another home-school graduate who is forthcoming about the problems she encountered as a home-schooled child. She had no experience of public education, and quickly came to fear it. Her father cast the local school as a corrupt example of the dangerous world outside the home. The family’s isolationism created an environment in which everyone was so terrified of the outside they saw no choice but to submit to her father’s abusive rule for many years. She says they had come to believe that the tyranny of their father was preferable to what might await them on the outside.

The oldest of eight children, Palmer grew up in an extremely conservative family that ultimately went entirely off the grid. They lived in a rural country home in Vermont without running water or electricity. Though she says home schooling started out with good enough intentions, it ultimately fell by the wayside, in part because of the sheer amount of work it took to subsist in Vermont without basic amenities while also maintaining the large family’s produce and livestock. It took so much time and energy to complete each day’s chores that they rarely had enough time to study.

Though she says all of the children in her family are literate, she tells me that, in math, she never made it past the start of pre-algebra, and that she has not yet obtained her GED. Since leaving the Quiverfull movement, she has found success as an artisanal cheese-maker, but many opportunities remain unavailable to her because of her upbringing. She speaks hopefully of continuing her schooling at some point, but feels self-conscious about working toward the GED at 29, when some of her younger sisters have already earned theirs. “I study and read things all the time,” she says, “but I haven’t done anything official yet.”

Palmer insists that her family was not alone in home-school neglect. Among the various fundamentalist families that ran in her family’s social circles, she says, “I knew several families whose children were not very literate.” Moreover, she points out, education is “more than just learning math and science and the facts of history – it’s learning how to interact with the kids around you, and figuring out what different kinds of personalities bring to life.

“You can do home schooling right if you’re very careful,” she acknowledges. “Know all the ways it can go wrong and guard against these; have outside interaction; get help with what you need help with and use a decent curriculum.” But most home-schoolers, Palmer points out, “are woefully lacking in every area” of their education.

Palmer sends me a note after we talk that reads, “I know of a family right now in pretty much the exact same situation we were in back then. They reported [their home-schooling status] to the state once, eight years ago, and never after that, to my knowledge. The state never caught on… They are one of the families I know whose children are functionally illiterate. Their 18-year-old daughter can read, but can barely write a paragraph… and the education goes significantly downhill from there. Her youngest brother, almost 11, has barely learned to read.”

I follow up to find out if anyone has reported the family to social services. She says they have been reported, but very little has changed.

*

Still, this is not to say there aren’t many home-schooling parents who are doing an excellent job of ensuring that their children receive a quality education. Most parents realize they are taking on a tremendous amount of responsibility when they commit to home-schooling a child, so I am not surprised to find many – secular and religious – who are doing well by their children.

Maria Hoffman Goeller is one of those. A lifelong family friend, Goeller is a home-school graduate raised in a conservative Christian home, where she never lagged behind in academics. Now she has a son with special needs in the California public school system but educates two other school-age children at home. “Part of the reason we home-school is because I’m choosing what worldview or what subjects I want to introduce my child to,” she says. But she understand the limits of her own skill, which is why she placed her special-needs son in public school. “While I can teach my children reading, writing and arithmetic, I am not trained in special education,” she says. “I want my child to have the best education he can get, which at this time is public school.”

Though she considers herself conservative, Goeller does not demonize public schools as some families do. And contrary to stereotypes about Christian home-schoolers, Goeller is adamant that she will not sacrifice academic rigor, or shield her children from views different from her own. In fact, she says she would welcome more opportunities for them to interact with public school students, for example, in sports and even in certain classes now and then.

Certainly, Goeller is not alone in the care and thoughtfulness she takes with her children’s home-school education. But in light of what Garrison, Diegel Martin and Palmer tell me, it seems irresponsible to assert, as many home-schooling parents do, that home-schooling neglect is just a fringe element in the homschooling world. And getting a straight answer about the scope of the problem from people who champion the cause is difficult at best.

Take Kelly Hogaboom, a secular “unschooling” mother who maintains a popular home-schooling blog called Underbellie, and boasts of having “two terminally truant children.” Hogaboom is an advocate for home schooling and “unschooling,” a type of home schooling that often forgoes curriculum in favor of more child-directed education. She is dismissive of the cases of neglect that I bring up, saying, by way of shutting down my inquiries: “Like yourself, I too had…a deep fear of religious fundamentalism and an erroneous belief state institutions could and should stamp it out.”

Of course, her response misses the mark; the issue of “stamping out” religious expression isn’t the point here. The issue at stake is educational neglect — which is, as the anecdotal evidence shows, an actual problem. My hope is that by looking to home-schooling parents for insights, they will be able to provide an honest assessment of their own successes and failures — in order to paint a more textured picture of the actual potential for neglect.

But in the end, Hogaboom declines to discuss the topic at all, urging me instead to read alternative theories of education she thinks I may have missed. And just in case I don’t understand that she has dismissed the concerns I raise, she concludes our email discussion by saying: “I get a laugh [at] how many grown-ups enjoy talking amongst themselves about what’s best for children” – and following it up with a smiley emoticon.

Though I am frustrated by her failure to engage with me, on some level, I understand her irritation. Home-schooling parents are probably called upon to apologize for neglectful home-schoolers quite a bit. But apologies are not what I’m looking for. I want to know about their experiences – positive and negative — as a way of understanding how to better prevent neglect.

Of course there are parents who are qualified to teach their children at home, and who do an excellent job of it. And there are children who excel in home-schooling environments. These families may well constitute a majority of home-schoolers. But this does not mean that all children do so well, and just as public schools are obligated to educate children who fall behind, so are parents who opt out of the system.

*

Kathryn Joyce, author of “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,” confirms that there are legitimate reasons for being concerned about a lack of oversight among home-schoolers. She acknowledges the diversity of the home-schooling movement, but notes, for example, that, “among the Quiverfull community, there are families that home-school in such a way that education begins to diverge between boys’ education and girls education around the time they hit puberty.”

Sometimes, Joyce says, girls, “stop receiving the same education as their brothers and are trained instead to fulfill the role that they’re going to have, which is to be a Quiverfull mother and a submissive wife.”

She recalls an anecdote from Quiverfull leader Geoffrey Botkin, who suggested that girls should be taught to use the tools of the laboratory they will inhabit: the kitchen and the nursery. Girls’ education should prioritize “learning how to be mothers, learning in the kitchen, helping their mothers – not merely as chores that are a part of growing up. Rather, the point was that this should be a key part of their education because this was going to be their chief role.” Though Joyce says many home-schoolers go on to do exceptionally well once they go to college, she has also encountered problems with basics like literacy.

Given these sorts of issues, I am unconvinced when Rachel Goldberg, a secular home-schooling mother from Charlotte, North Carolina, echoes what I hear from home-schooling parents of every stripe on the subject of government oversight. “I don’t think there should be any regulation of home schooling,” she says. “I’m not a libertarian or a conspiracy theorist, but I am fiercely protective of my kids and my choices about how to raise them. It’s none of the government’s business how I teach them. Just as I wouldn’t want the state to require me to submit menu plans and quarterly nutritional assessments (even though I believe nutrition is vitally important), I don’t want the state to require curricula plans, portfolios, etc.”

According to Joyce, among extremist Quiverfull families (quite unlike Goldberg’s) there is often “a sense of persecution” when it comes to oversight; many families that refuse to report their activities do so because they fear state intrusion. But their fear may have very little basis in fact. “Often, people have to look outside the United States, to countries like Sweden, where home schooling is much more heavily regulated, to make this argument,” Joyce notes. “There isn’t as much evidence that persecution is happening here, but I think they get a lot of organizing value and activism mobilization out of the argument that they’re persecuted.”

Erika Diegel Martin, whose parents were anti-government extremists, agrees. Her parents did not report their first year of home schooling to the state out of fear, but because she lived in a small New Hampshire town, the neighbors eventually noticed when the children weren’t in school. Finally, a truancy officer showed up to inquire, and as a result, the family reported their home-schooling status. “Look, any other parents [in] a public school would be charged with truancy if their kids didn’t show up at school,” Diegel Martin points out. “Why should it be any different for a home-school family that isn’t reporting their children? It’s our government’s responsibility to make sure that our children are getting a proper education.”

My old friend Maria Hoffman Goeller is a bit more cautious about the need for oversight. With one child in the public school system and two learning at home, Goeller insists that she has not experienced over-regulation in California, one of the more tightly regulated states. But she is always on the alert, she says, for any government mandate that might try to determine “what I can and cannot teach.”

Goeller tells me that her apprehension about over-regulation stems from the arrests of home-schooling parents she knew during childhood, before home schooling was well-understood in the United States. She remembers at least a couple of parents being arrested for truancy, and she remains unconvinced that they deserved this. Some families she knew opted not to report because of these cases. For those children, this meant not answering phones and hiding in the house if a stranger knocked on the front door.

No one I speak to who is home schooling today mentions that this sort of oppressive regulation is a reality for current home-schooling families. Instead, they say that today’s regulation consists mostly of bureaucratic paper-pushing – hardly the kind of home-school persecution some fear. It may be annoying, but so far as I can tell, it’s not trampling on anyone’s rights – though that doesn’t keep home-schoolers from worrying.

*

Ultimately, the women who report neglect in home schooling want their experiences to serve as a warning that either greater restrictions on home schooling are needed, or states need to do a better job of enforcing existing regulations.

For 18 years, Vyckie Garrison says, she continued home schooling even though it became increasingly evident that “we should not have been home schooling. It was a really bad idea for us, but we believed firmly that it was our obligation, that it would be sinful to send our children to public schools, which we called ‘Satan’s indoctrination centers.’” She tells me that yearly testing requirements “would have made a huge difference for our family. It would have either convinced us to quit home schooling, or to do a much better job of meeting those minimum requirements.”

I don’t believe the answer is to end home schooling altogether, and neither do any of the women I talk to, no matter what their experience with home schooling. But neither is it acceptable to allow more home-schooled children to fall through the cracks. And since no one should be deprived of an education, we have a duty to listen to those who were overlooked.

Melinda Palmer has become a vocal critic of home-school neglect since leaving her home about six years ago at the age of 22. She cites “the grace of God” as the reason for her survival, as well as the support of her mother and siblings. She is still a Christian, but says her family believed in a “warped understand of God.” Today, she is no longer a fundamentalist and no longer afraid of living out in the world. She has also gotten involved in advocacy on behalf of better home-schooling regulation.

Of all my sources, Palmer has the most concrete ideas about what needs to change in order to make home schooling safer for all kids. “First,” she says, “we should not reduce the oversight. Second, we need to make sure every child who is not in a public school is either on a private school roster or is on the home-school watch list. I know of many in Vermont right now who are not even registered as home-schoolers, and no one pays attention …When kids are far below grade level, it should raise red flags, and someone should be looking into it.”

Furthermore, as a sister to several children with cognitive disabilities, Palmer highlights the particular attention that home-schooled children with special needs deserve. “If kids have disabilities, the government needs to make sure that the disabilities are being addressed either by the parents or by an intervening agency.…A child with disabilities,” she notes, “has as much right to an appropriate education” as any other child.

Just before we hang up the phone, she makes a final request: “Please spread the word that it is really necessary for the government to make sure children aren’t being robbed of an education… Kids have rights too, and one of them is the right to an education appropriate to their age and ability.”

It’s an important point, and I conclude with it because it is one of the more incisive analyses I’ve heard on this topic yet. There is simply no justification for allowing cases of educational neglect – wherever it exists – to go unchecked. We need not imprison more parents to make sure this happens, but improving state and local oversight of those who opt out would be one step in the right direction. As Garrison, Diegel Martin and Palmer acknowledge, better checks on their own home education would have made a vast difference for them. This is why, they say, they will continue to speak out.

But now he’s won primaries in Tennessee and Oklahoma, caucuses in Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota and North Dakota and a (not entirely inconsequential) beauty contest in Missouri. And he’s probably not done, with a bundle of very winnable states on the horizon. It’s almost certain that the primary season will end with Santorum winning the second-most votes, the second-most states and the second-most delegates.

By every conventional metric, in other words, he’ll be the second-place guy – and the funny thing about second-place guys in modern GOP nominating contests is that they tend to become the first-place guy the next time there’s an open nomination. Entering this cycle, the pattern had held for four of the five most recent open contest runners-up, and a Romney victory this year will make it five out of six.

Of course, the idea of Santorum as the 2016 Republican front-runner doesn’t quite seem right. His success this year feels almost entirely accidental. He couldn’t gain an inch of traction anywhere until the week before the Iowa caucuses, when that state’s Anyone But Mitt crowd settled on him as the least objectionable vehicle for their cause. And even though he ended up essentially tying Romney on caucus night (and being declared the winner weeks later), Santorum faded back to obscurity in the next four GOP contests, allowing Newt Gingrich – Newt Gingrich! – to eclipse him. Only when Gingrich was killed off for the second time and the Anyone But Mitts were again out of options did Santorum reemerge.

So his success says very little about his strengths as a candidate. It’s only because of a peculiar mix of circumstances – a restive GOP base in search of “purity” it can’t seem to define and a front-runner whose moderate past, Northern roots and Mormon faith make him a uniquely poor fit for a significant chunk of that base – that there’s been an opening for Santorum to exploit. And he’s only been able to exploit that opening because he could clear a comically low competence threshold that literally every other non-Romney candidate couldn’t. Despite his victories, his campaign still reeks of amateurism, missing state ballots, failing to file delegate slates, and lacking even a national headquarters.

Santorum is just not in the same class as the other modern Republicans who’ve gone from next-in-line to nominee:

Ronald Reagan: Back when there was a genuine left-right divide in the GOP, he challenged Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries and nearly knocked him off. That cemented Reagan as the right’s undisputed leader and allowed him to spend the next four years seeking to expand that base. In that same span, the party’s conservative wing grew further and the moderate/liberal side contracted, a trend that made Reagan an even more formidable front-runner when he launched his 1980 bid.

George H.W. Bush: In a way, Bush’s example is proof that literal next-in-line status can be overrated. He finished second to Reagan in the ’80 primaries, but he did so running to the left – supporting abortion rights and the ERA, ridiculing supply-side economics, and rallying the party’s dying Rockefeller wing. Eight years later, when Reagan’s second term ended and the GOP nomination was again open, the brand of Republicanism Bush championed in ’80 was obsolete. It was only because he made it onto the GOP ticket as Reagan’s V.P. that Bush was able to reinvent himself as a true believer conservative in the ‘80s, win over skeptical leaders on the right, and ride his ties to Reagan to the 1988 nomination, and the presidency. For Bush, finishing second was a springboard to the nomination in an indirect way: He performed well enough that Reagan felt he had to offer him the No. 2 slot for the sake of party unity.

Bob Dole: Dole gave Bush a scare in ’88, crushing him in Iowa (where Bush also finished behind Pat Robertson) and nearly following it up in New Hampshire a week later. But from that point on, Bush cruised, and when the race was over Dole returned to his day job as the Senate’s GOP leader – which made him the top Republican in national politics when Bush was voted out of the White House four years later. Thanks to the punch-line status of Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, and the lack of interest by the most popular Republican in America, Colin Powell, Dole entered the 1996 GOP race as by far the best-known candidate. By that point, he’d run once for vice president (with Ford in ’76), twice for president (in ’80 and ’88) and been the top Senate Republican for a dozen years – and he still almost blew it, barely surviving in Iowa and losing New Hampshire. What saved Dole was the identity of his chief challenger, Pat Buchanan, whose trade and foreign policy views put him far outside the party’s mainstream and whose history of inflammatory rhetoric unnerved the GOP’s opinion-shaping class.

John McCain: McCain’s second-place finish in 2000 made him a national political rock star, but it also came with a giant asterisk: Because so much of his support had come from independents and Democrats – who delighted in watching McCain thumb his nose at George W. Bush and his army of establishment Republican backers – there was reason to doubt he’d be the GOP’s choice in 2008. But after flirting in the early part of Bush’s presidency with bolting the party and becoming an independent (or even a Democrat), McCain embraced Bush and sought peace with the same forces he’d decried in ’00. The process was hardly clean, and it’s doubtful he would have succeeded if the McCain skeptics on the right hadn’t been split between Romney and Mike Huckabee, but McCain did come to the race with an obvious base of support and some real strengths.

Romney: He finished second in total votes and second in states won against McCain, although he did nab a few less delegates than Huckabee – probably because Huckabee stayed in the race longer. Romney’s path, you may have noticed, has been as rocky as McCain’s, probably more so. After all, he’s losing states to Rick Santorum. Still, Romney has been able to put together what is by far the most serious campaign organization on the GOP side, allowing him to maximize his delegate take and neutralize every serious threat that’s emerged.

At this point, Santorum just wouldn’t bring the kind of strengths to a ’16 race that these men brought to their follow-up bids. At the same time, though, he’s in a different class than Buchanan, the one modern second-place finisher who didn’t go on to win the nomination. Unlike Buchanan, Santorum’s platform is mainstream by his party’s standards, and he’d be a more naturally acceptable nominee. Indeed, his success in the current race is a result of key elements of the GOP base finding him a more acceptable choice than Romney. He is not rallying outsiders to wage war on the GOP.

Still, he does have Buchanan’s penchant for the kind of needlessly inflammatory rhetoric that unnerves party elites. Opinion-shaping Republicans will have too many other options in the next nomination fight to view Santorum as their default candidate. And he won’t come to that race with the sort of built-in army of supporters and donors that would compel party elites to back him.

So what can Santorum cash in his new stature for? In the ideal scenario for him, he’ll get extremely lucky and Romney, for whatever reason, will invite him onto this year’s ticket. Running on the losing ticket might not boost him that much (Dole’s ’80 campaign, launched after his ’76 V.P. bid, comes to mind here), but if he and Romney were to win, the equation would change for Santorum, and he’d be in position to follow the Bush 41 model. But that scenario, for many, many reasons, is a long shot.

Alternately, he could return to Pennsylvania and pursue statewide office there again – but now not as a defeated ex-senator making a desperate comeback bid but instead as a former presidential candidate with a national profile. The problem here, though, is that there’s not an obvious opening on the horizon, with Republican Gov. Tom Corbett presumably seeking reelection in 2014 and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey presumably doing the same in 2016. At this point, Santorum would probably have to wait until 2018 (at least), when Democrat Bob Casey’s Senate seat will be up (assuming Casey wins this year).

So maybe running for president again is Santorum’s best option. He’d at least be taken more seriously in the formative stages of the next campaign than he was in this one, even if he’d still be a long shot for the nomination. But it would beat the mundane life of an ex-senator that Santorum was fleeing when he entered the ’12 race. As one of his old law partners told the New Republic recently, “Over the years, I’ve never seen him so happy as when he’s on a campaign.”