U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum has his own variation of that old excuse for shameful behavior: The devil made me do it. Speaking of the child-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, the senator has offered this explanation: The liberals made them do it.

That's not quite how he put it, but it's close enough. "Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture," he wrote. "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."

The Republican senator from Pennsylvania wrote this in a July 12, 2002, article for the Web site Catholic Online -- and no doubt he will discern a political plot in the belated rise to outrage. But the senator is fresh from criticizing working mothers in his new book and so it is not so remarkable that his past utterances are being examined. Last week, his comments about the church pedophile scandal received fresh attention from a Boston Globe columnist and various bloggers.

What is remarkable is that Sen. Santorum did not back away from his comments. Instead of pleading that the passage of time had lent his thoughts more perspective, which he could have fairly done, he repeated them. That had Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy and others in the Massachusetts congressional delegation denouncing him.

Among Sen. Santorum's supporters, being denounced by the likes of Sen. Kennedy will be taken as a badge of honor, but he deserves the ire of anyone with a sense of decency. These comments were insulting, bigoted and stupid. At the heart of what he said is a vile suggestion: To be a liberal is to favor child abuse.

The pedophile priest scandal in the Catholic Church was a national phenomenon that happened to come into the spotlight in Boston. It could just as well be argued that this occurred there because of the pressure of outraged liberal parishioners and the focus of a great liberal newspaper, The Boston Globe, to end the abuses. But the truth is that political opinions shaping the culture had nothing to do with it.

As The Washington Post reported, the diocese with the highest percentage of abusive priests from 1950 to 2003 was in a red state, Covington, Ky., while cities commonly regarded as liberal had relatively low rates (including San Francisco).

Boston happens to be the cradle of the revolution that guaranteed Sen. Santorum the right to say the stupid things he does. It is also a city not unlike Pittsburgh. It has its harbor and we have our rivers, but it also heavily Catholic with, yes, lots of liberals, plenty of proud working-class inhabitants as well as high-tech innovators and academics at great institutions.

When the senator shoots his mouth off about Boston, he comes close to maligning Pittsburgh. It will be something to remember in 2006 when voters consider the fate of Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Embarrassment.