With just over two months left before the North Carolina primary and still four Republican candidates left in the race, I believe it is important for us, as eligible voters, to take a serious look at who may be representing us. In today’s episode we will be taking a look at presidential hopeful Rick Santorum , the senator from the keystone state, Pennsylvania.
Like most people, I had never heard of Santorum until 2004 when Dan Savage hosted a contest to let people come up with a definition of santorum , after he made some particularly homophobic remarks. The winning definition of this contest is not fit to be printed in this paper, but you can find it pretty easily if you Google it. After all, it was the number one Google search result for Santorum from 2004-2011. When I heard this it gave me a chuckle, some homophobic moron is being made fun of, that’s great. Then I heard he was running for the GOP nomination, even worse he ended up getting as far as he has.
Santorum’s homophobic views on what their rights should be and how they should be treated border on lunacy and are clearly hateful. In 2003, when asked about how he feels about homosexual acts, he responded that, to him, it was no different than pedophilia and bestiality and that if you give people the right to privacy of sex in their own home, then you have to allow polygamy, incest and adultery. Right, because allowing two able-minded, consenting adults to do the same thing tons of irresponsible teenagers are legally allowed to do is the same as scarring the life of a young child.
It makes total sense to say a man copulating with a dog or a woman that makes coitus with a horse are the same as two respectable members of the human race that love someone with the same hardware. And of course it makes sense, if two homosexuals are allowed to get married and have sex in the privacy of their own home that you have to allow anything to happen—even a man getting married to a woman. Oh wait, that’s okay and obviously doesn’t lead down the same slippery slope as homosexuals doing the exact same thing.
Santorum’s hate doesn’t stop at homosexuals; more recent comments have led me to believe he also hates women. Abortion has been a hot topic for decades in the United States. This heated debate over the issue is justifiable considering all the factors and scenarios needing to be considered.
In January of this year during a interview on CNN with Piers Morgan, when asked about his view of abortion when the pregnancy is a result of rape Santorum said “I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.” Is this guy serious? A rape baby is a gift from God? An unwillfull , violent, violation of your person resulting in a lifelong reminder of that traumatic incident is supposed to be a gift from the merciful God? How can he even say things like that? How can women in the Republican Party not call for him to be dismissed as a potential representative of their party? What makes even less sense is earlier in the interview he said his stance on abortion had nothing to do with religion, yet the reason a rape victim should keep the baby is because it’s a gift from God.
Hang on; I think I see what’s really going on here. Santorum doesn’t actually believe anything he’s saying. Nobody could actually believe what he’s said. Rick Santorum must just be showing us what happens when you take social conservatism to its rational end and wouldn’t you know it, social conservatism is completely backward when taken to extremes.