But those same defenders also struggle with the tension of wishing Santorum would sometimes give his critics less to work with.

Their comments have come in talk shows and in columns over the past week, as Santorum — long a figure of the 1990s culture wars whom conservatives view as authentic on social issues — has waded into discussions about prenatal testing, birth control and the president’s “theology.”

Around the same time, his top financial backer made a crude joke about women and birth control, one that Santorum had to spend two days swatting away. Santorum insisted he shouldn’t have to be responsible for every supporter’s “stupid joke” but that didn’t matter. Foster Friess’s aspirin-between-the-knees line still fed a nascent narrative about Santorum struggling with women voters, one that was already gaining traction amid news on his stands on issues like contraception.

“The media has unleashed the hounds on Rick Santorum,” wrote National Review’s Rich Lowry in his syndicated column on Tuesday.

“Santorum is a standing affront to the sensibilities and assumptions of the media and political elite,” he wrote.

“That elite is constantly writing the obituary for social conservatism, which is supposed to wither away and leave a polite, undisturbed consensus in favor of social liberalism. Santorum not only defends beliefs that are looked down upon as dated and unrealistic, he does it with a passionate sincerity that opens him to mockery and attack.”

That was the defense. But there was a hint of advice, too: Santorum, Lowry conceded, “occasionally needs to curb his enthusiasms. But the implicit message of his candidacy is unassailable: Denounce and dismiss it as you please, American social conservatism is here to stay.”

The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, who has written columns praising Santorum, said he should not be condemned for saying what he thinks.

“I’m slightly on the side of the people who would defend Santorum against what I think is now a pretty ridiculous effort to paint him as an oddball or lunatic,” Kristol told POLITICO.

As an example, he cited the efforts to make him “some kind of insane theocrat. I think we’d know after 20-plus years in public life if he couldn’t function” in his elected official role.

“I think there’s something a little silly about that, which isn’t to say I wouldn’t or he wouldn’t, if he could, go back and rewrite (things) or do things a little differently,” he said.

He added, “A lot of conservatives like and respect Rick Santorum. … Some conservatives worry that he’s been too outspoken or simply given ammunition for possible distortion. … [It’s] not a crazy worry.”

At the same time, he argued, no politician should be held to a standard where they are never allowed to err, adding, “There’s not a politician who I’ve admired in my lifetime” who met the test of total agreement.

William McGurn, writing in The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages, asked rhetorically why Barack Obama gets a different response from the media for saying marriage is between a man and a woman than Santorum does.

“There’s no mystery why,” he concluded. “Mr. Santorum is attacked because everyone understands that he means what he says. … Mr. Romney is behind because Republican voters have yet to be persuaded he stands for anything. Mr. Santorum is ahead because even those who might not sign onto all his social particulars are hungry for a nominee who does not bend with the wind.”

The two positions are not mutually exclusive — if anything, they’re connected.

A number of prominent conservatives admire Santorum’s lack of flexibility on his principles and say it’s hypocritical for the press and the public to say they want pols to be unvarnished — only to hit them on specifics that may not play well in the mainstream media.

“He’s one of them,” said one longtime Republican operative, noting that conservative elites and pundits have taken a very different approach to Santorum than they have collectively to Mitt Romney, who is viewed with suspicion, or to Gingrich, who is seen by many as mostly interested in the Tao of Newt.

Columnist Peggy Noonan repeatedly criticized Gingrich in The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, the National Review wrote an editorial calling on Gingrich to drop out not long ago, citing his poor judgment and the need for the party to unite around the surging Santorum.

There have been other moments of tension with past conservative candidates, such as Rick Perry and Gingrich, as conservatives have tried to reconcile the hopefuls’ flaws with the contrast they offered to Romney, who they deemed hollow.

Yet after a decades-long public career, the former congressman and Senator’s record is rife with comments on a range of issues that segments of the electorate find difficult to relate to (such as his now-famous 2008 speech about Satan setting his “sights” on the U.S.). They are part of the fabric of who Santorum is — religious, of a view of the world in fixed moral terms.

And people who like, or at least admire, Santorum’s outspokenness feel he’s giving his opponents and critics easy fodder when he goes into this territory, knowing that his comments about social issues are the ones that will make headlines, even when he mostly stays on a message about the economy and the working class.

For instance, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who has slammed the left for some of the criticisms of Santorum, was among those who, after the Satan speech was splashed across the Drudge Report on Tuesday, said the former senator is going to have to explain the comments.

“That stuff is out there,” Limbaugh said. “It’s headlined on Drudge and the left has it, and Santorum will have to deal with it. He’ll have to answer it. I don’t know. It’s just not the kind of stuff you hear a presidential candidate talk about. It’s not ordinary in that sense.”

For his part, Santorum pushed back that the speech was “not relevant to what’s being discussed in America today” while saying he would defend what he’s said in the past. And Limbaugh liked what he heard, deeming it a good response on his show Wednesday.

McGurn suggested a curative for Santorum: “The answer is that when Mr. Santorum discusses these issues, he needs to fold them into his larger narrative about the free society. That narrative has to do with pointing out the dependency that comes with an expanding federal government, the importance of family, and the threat to freedom when, say, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals or a Health and Human Services secretary can substitute their own opinions on these issues for the judgment of the American people.”

He continued in his WSJ piece, “There is, however, one area where Mr. Santorum needs to demonstrate a discipline it’s not yet clear he has. That is the ability to resist the efforts to drag him out of the public questions into the weeds of theological debate.”

That does not mean compromise, he argued, adding, “Mr. Santorum cannot change the double standard. With a little discipline, however, he need not let himself be defined by it.”

Kristol said that the fact that conservatives are, for the most part, defending Santorum “shows conservative journalists are trying to think for themselves.” That includes allowing for Santorum to have views of his own.

Yet not all conservatives think that Santorum has been subject to something that goes beyond the norm for Republican candidates.

John Podhoretz, the former New York Post editorial page writer who now writes for Commentary Magazine, has written that yes, Santorum is getting depicted as extreme by the left, but his real problem is a lack of optimism, not the liberal elites.

Talking about the nation in fire-and-brimstone terms without a vision for the future that is based on optimism “is not a path to winning an electorate’s heart,” he told POLITICO.

As for whether it’s fair that Santorum is “getting beaten up?”

“Who cares,” he said. “This isn’t about fairness. That’s life. … The notion that Santorum is going to be denied his rightful place as president because the media’s in the tank for President Obama [is wrong].”