Rick Santorum's Socially Conservative Religious Zeal Is Just Scary

The rights social conservative crusade, like most things Republican, has a very distinct tinge of hypocrisy. They want to tell you who you can love, what you can do in your own bedroom, what you can do with your own body, and attempt at every turn to legislate their own brand of religious morality. While on the other hand, if your some multi-millionaire, corporation, or industrial giant that has the potential to influence all manner of public policy that effects our economy, our tax code for the rich, regulations on banks, our water, our air, our food, and our environment, its hands off? It is a perspective that is to often lost in today's political discussions.
From attempting to strip funding for Planned Parenthood, have state referendums that dictate life begins at conception, to morphing a government mandate about fairness with regard to woman's rights, into a battle over religious freedom, the republican agenda is crystal clear.

Enter our man Rick Santorum. I spoke previously about his 2005 book It Takes A Family, but politician's who write books often give us a blueprint of the man behind the curtain, the man some individuals may otherwise not want revealed. In the recent HHS contraception mandate fight, Santorum was front and center in calling it an infringement on religious freedoms, well at least he's consistent.

So lets take a look at the world according to Rick Santorum? His political credo is Faith, Family, and Freedom, it is important to note the order here, because it's not only spot on, its quite literal. Lets look at some quotes from his book, as well as, some of his comments on the record.

From the Book:
"Conservatives trust families and the ordinary Americans that are formed by them. Liberals don't. They border on disdain for the common man."
"Ordinary Americans" who is he talking about? What is an "ordinary American? Again this is dog whistle political verbiage meaning white, christian families, that function in the 1950's traditional role where women stay home and raise babies, while men go to work. To be against this is to have "...disdain for the common man."

"We now have a generation that has grown up with the belief, inspired by the Sixties' free-love assault on sexual mores, that true love is a feeling, and that it should not be resisted or constrained--rather, its ultimate validation is through sexual relations, without regard to the outdated social convention of marriage."
Once again, lets get into our wayback machines and go back to the 50's where minorities, women, and homosexuals knew their place.

On the Record:
Republican former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum's statements about homosexuality and the right to privacy. In an interview with the Associated Press (AP) taped on April 7, 2003, and published April 20, 2003, Santorum stated that he believed mutually consenting adults do not have a constitutional right to privacy with respect to sexual acts. Santorum described the ability to regulate consensual homosexual acts as comparable to the states' ability to regulate other consensual and non-consensual sexual behavior, such as adultery, polygamy, child molestation, incest, and bestiality, whose decriminalization he believed would threaten society and the family, as they are not monogamous and heterosexual.
OK here we have a perfect example of Republicans who preach the horrors of big government, while telling you what you can and can't do in the privacy of your own bedroom? Maybe if it was Exxon and Mobil in the bedroom they would leave them alone?

In the interview by Associated Press reporter Lara Jakes Jordan When Jordan asked "Okay, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue that they should not have sex?" Santorum's response concluded:"In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality —" (At this point, Jordan commented, "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about 'man on dog' with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out", coining a phrase widely used in connection with this incident.
Here again, no matter your thoughts on the subject, Republicans have to take it to the extreme in an attempt to save their argument. No one is suggesting "man on dog" sex here. Its simply about the right of two consenting adults, regardless of their gender, to display affection for one another in the privacy of their own homes. Again they have to turn it into something they see as so repellent it borders on the edge of social anarchy.

He lamented the laws that overturned states ability to ban the sale of contraception in 1965. He further decried the law that outlawed interracial marriage in 1967. He has openly stated his support to allow states to once again ban contraception, and his homophobic rhetoric continues sometimes veiled, sometimes not. Regardless, this is the real Rick Santorum. He makes no excuses about what he believes, and what he stands for, and that my friends, is scary.