The HyperTexts

Rick Santorum Quotes

compiled by Michael R. Burch

Rick Santorum's Insanitarium, in His Own Words

If you read and analyze what Rick Santorum has said himself, you can see that he has called popes "atheists" for believing in evolution, and 99% of Americans dupes of the Devil for using contraceptives and having sex for purposes of intimacy and pleasure, rather than strictly for babymaking. He denies evolution, global warming, the right of women to decide if and when to become mothers, the right of rape victims not to be forced to bear their rapists' babies, and wants to abolish public education because he thinks any school that disagrees with his absurd ideas has fallen under the influence of "the father of lies," Satan.

Contraception is "not okay" but is "deeply, morally wrong" ... a "grave moral wrong" that should be outlawed by the government.
Rapists are giving young girls "gifts" when the rape victims become pregnant ... "broken" gifts, but gifts nonetheless.
—Rick Santorum

Outlawing contraception would, of course, return American women to the Stone Age, forcing them to give up sex or bear as many babies as nature dictates (please pardon the pun). And according to the "I know the mind of God" wisdom of Rick Santorum, if a young girl is raped and becomes pregnant, she should be forced to risk her life, health and mental well-being to bear her rapist's baby. She should be told to accept her rapist's baby as a "gift" and "accept what God is giving to you." (Yes, those are Santorum's actual words!) But because her rapist had free will, it was not God who made the decision to rape and impregnate her, but an incredibly selfish, callous human being. Do selfish, callous rapists have the right to force young girls to risk their life, health and sanity? Only in the bizarre "faith" of men with medieval mindsets like Rick Santorum does God always side with men, even rapists, against the right of girls and women to choose whether to become mothers. How many pre-teen rape victims are physically and mentally ready to become mothers? Girls as young as 5 to 11 years old have become pregnant, as this Wikipedia article illustrates. Should they risk death to bear their rapists' babies? Is that God's will, really?

This is Rick Santorum, the OCD moralist, waxing eloquent on his favorite subject, which is forcing Americans to always make babies whenever they have sex. Many Americans fail to grok Santorum on the subject of contraception, because he's so extreme in his views that he makes George W. Bush seem positively liberal. What Santorum has clearly said more than once is that contraception is evil, and that he wants it made illegal. This is, of course, the position of the Roman Catholic Church, which equates contraception with murder, or something akin to murder. If Santorum has his way with the American public, he will not only send women back to the Dark Ages, forcing them to either give up sex or have as many babies as nature commands, but he will also endanger the lives and health of millions of Americans by making condoms illegal. Do we really want a president willing to hand out harrowing death sentences to American children, the way the Pope hands them out to children in Africa and Latin America? Do we really want a president who considers 99% of Americans to be evildoers because they have sex for purposes of intimacy and pleasure? Do we really want a president who in a 2008 speech at Ave Maria College said that "mainstream, mainline" American Protestants were deluded by and following the Devil?

The idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic.
—Rick Santorum

Incredibly, Rick Santorum wants to abolish public education! Why? If you read this page and study other things he's said, the reason  becomes clear. He actually believes that American schools, universities and 99% of Americans have been duped by the Devil because they don't adhere to Roman Catholic dogma that contraceptives are sinful and that sex must always be for purposes of babymaking. According to Santorum, if you have sex for purposes of intimacy and pleasure, even if you are married, and aren't trying to have babies, you are a Devil worshiper.

I think there are a lot of problems with the theory of evolution, and do believe that it is used to promote to a worldview that is anti-theist, that is atheist.
—Rick Santorum

According to Rick Santorum, Pope John Paul II was an atheist because in 1996 he said: "... new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis." In 1950, before Santorum was born, the Papal encyclical Humani Generis clearly stated that it was permissible for Catholics to believe in evolution. So Pope Pius XII must have been an atheist too!

America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography. It contributes to misogyny and violence against women.
—Rick Santorum

As is so often the case, Rick Santorum is dead wrong. Since porn became available on the Internet in 1991, rape has dropped by 86%. And while Santorum insists that obscenity laws should be "vigorously enforced," most American disagree that the government should interfere with the sex lives of consenting adults. And if Santorum did wage his threatened war with pornographers, they would just move offshore, costing Americans more high-paying jobs.

When I look at her, I think of how God looks at me: So disabled.
—Rick Santorum

Having watched and heard Rick Santorum preach fiery, irrational sermons on the campaign stump, I heartily agree and sympathize with God!

Our civil laws have to comport with a higher law: God's law.
—Rick Santorum

That might be well and good, if everyone was able to agree on what God's law is. But what Rick Santorum so fervently believes is that God's law requires human beings to try to make babies every time they have sex. Is that a "higher law," really, since now that we have no predators other than disease, we live much longer lives than in the wild, and breeding like rabbits would bankrupt our nation and destroy the ecology?

So now that I believe in what the Catholic Church teaches about homosexuality, I'm a bigot?
—Rick Santorum

Unfortunately, yes. The Roman Catholic Church has been wrong about all sorts of things before. It once threatened to excommunicate (and possibly execute) Galileo for saying that the earth orbits the sun. It tortured and killed women for being "witches" even though we know women do not have supernatural powers. It tortured and killed men and women as "heretics" over points of religious dogma. It sanctioned slavery; some Popes even owned slaves. Pope after Pope has sentenced children in poor countries to harrowing deaths by teaching them that using condoms is a "sin." So there is no reason to be a bigot just because the Catholic Church teaches bigotry.

I’m for separation of church and state: The state has no business telling the church what do to.
—Rick Santorum

Santorum's implication is obvious and ominous: he thinks the "correct" church (the Holy Roman Catholic Church) should be able to tell the government what to do. If this happens, 99% of Americans may end up living under laws that enforce a medieval "morality" they don't agree with. As Betty Clermont pointed out in her article "Santorum the Catholic Theocrat," considering "the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church, Santorum is very much espousing the tradition of alliances between church and state. Prelates defended the 'divine right of kings' and monarchs gave the hierarchs privilege, royal titles, land and money." In other words, Santorum wants to return Americans to a feudal system in which the church rules the state and the state rules the people. In such a system, individual freedom and conscience are severely limited and engaging in prohibited forms of sex may be punished by the ruling theocrats, according to their Dark Age "morality."

There is no Palestinian.
—Rick Santorum

This grossly racist, grossly unjust statement explains why Americans suffered through 9-11 and two catastrophic wars. Palestinian men and nearly two billion Muslims will never agree that millions of completely innocent Palestinian women and children do not exist, simply because some Jews and Christians consider them rightless insects to be swept from the path of the "Chosen Few." If we want peace rather than unending wars in the Middle East, we must accept the fact that Muslim men love their women and children the same way we love ours, and will defend them just as aggressively from harm. Israel and the U.S. have never allowed the Palestinians to obtain equal rights, freedom, justice or representative government, and this has led to 60+ years of terrible suffering and despair, so of course some Muslim men are going to come after us in retribution, until we stop abusing their loved ones. Anyone else on the face of the earth would do the same thing (including us, if people we cared about were being treated like serfs, animals and insects). It is a grotesque form of racism to say that American women and children exist and thus have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but that Palestinian women and children do not really exist and thus do not have similar rights. This racist attitude led to the Trail of Tears and American slavery, the first two American holocausts. Now it has led to the third, the Nakba ("Catastrophe") of the Palestinians. If we want peace rather than war, we cannot afford to have leaders who are racists and fascists, like Rick Santorum.

What I'm talking about is onward American soldiers. What we're talking about are core American values.
—Rick Santorum, linking "American values" to medieval Holy Wars

The quote above helps explain why so many people in the Middle East distrust and fear the United States. The bellicose warmongering of high-ranking American politicians like Rick Santorum is truly disgusting. In the extended quote, which you can read below on this page, Santorum actually said that the Crusades were not aggression on the part of Christians, even though the holy warriors of the Roman Catholic Church invaded the Middle East and slaughtered large numbers of completely innocent Muslim and Jewish women and children in orgies of ethnic cleansing and genocide. How can anyone in his right mind link the slaughter of innocents to American values? But then true American values like tolerance, personal freedom and individual conscience are very hard to find anywhere in Santorum's speeches. When he calls himself a "conservative" he seems to be harking back to Holy Roman Emperors who ruled over the servile, docile masses with rods of iron and a severe, autocratic interpretation of the Bible.

The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is!
—Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum is a political talking head with a sizeable gap between his heedless (or unhearing) ears. He calls climate change "junk science," but no one with a brain can deny the altogether obvious evidence of global warming: receding glaciers, shrinking polar ice caps, rising sea levels, low-lying islands disappearing, the emergence of a once-fabled-but-now-actual Northwest Passage, etc. Last year, Pope Benedict XVI appealed for the success of a UN climate change conference, saying that a “credible” response was necessary. While it is possible to debate whether human beings are responsible, in the end that really doesn't matter a hill of beans. The dinosaurs were not responsible for the climate change that caused their extinction, but they perished nonetheless. Thanks to our more advanced brains we have options the dinosaurs lacked, but we need to use them rationally. For Rick Santorum to misrepresent facts in order cull votes from people who remain willfully blind is very dangerous for us, our children and grandchildren, and the entire planet. Yes, it is true that carbon dioxide in reasonable amounts is not dangerous. But in too-large amounts it can be lethal, and many human beings have died from carbon dioxide poisoning. Failing to manage carbon dioxide could prove lethal for human beings, animals and the planet.

Ronald Reagan would never apologize for the greatest country in the history of the world.
—Rick Santorum

Santorum said this while bashing President Obama for apologizing when the United States makes mistakes. But obviously when the United States makes mistakes, apologies are in order. Ronald Reagan signed legislation that apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. On August 10, 1988, Reagan said himself that "We admit a wrong." Also, Reagan's Justice Department issued a formal apology to France for protecting Klaus Barbie, a Nazi whom U.S. intelligence recruited and shielded in the aftermath of World War II. Reagan also expressed regret for the U.S. military shooting down an Iranian passenger jet over the Persian Gulf and offered compensation to both Iranian and non-Iranian victims.

An independent-minded friend of mine has taken to calling Rick Santorum "Richard the Zion-hearted," a pun on the appellation of the most famous Crusader. The shoe seems to fit, since Santorum is currently waging a one-man Holy War, Crusade and Inquisition against ecologists, science, women, sex, contraception, gays, liberals, higher education and the Protestant religion. Santorum is a right-wing theocrat who publicly confessed in his 2008 speech at Ave Maria College that he associates American colleges and "mainstream, mainline Protestantism" with "the Father of Lies," as if anyone who doesn't agree with his Dark Age morality has been seduced and misled by Satan. Politics truly does make strange bedfellows, because Santorum's most avid supporters are not Catholics, but the Protestant evangelicals he publicly accused of Devil Worship!

Rick Santorum, American Ayatollah

Santorum is a cult of one in American politics. But the political figure he most closely resembles is Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini: a rigid moralist with prehistoric views about women and sex whose puritanical regime dismantled family planning centers and ordered health care professionals not to advocate contraception. Sound familiar?

And like the Ayatollah Khomeini, Rick Santorum the autocratic cleric obviously considers mainstream America to be the “Great Satan.”

Why? Because due to his Roman Catholic upbringing, Santorum "knows" that sex for non-procreational purposes and the use of contraceptives are terrible "sins" in God's eyes. Since "mainstream, mainline" Protestants and most other Americans don't agree with Santorum, in his eyes they are dupes and pawns of Lucifer.

Rick Santorum, Hypocritical Moralist

And yet Santorum, who claims to be the only "true conservative" still running for president, seems to have been seduced into error himself, because he told Meet the Press that contraception is "deeply, morally wrong" but that he has no problem "at all" with women having access to contraceptives. Does it make any sense whatsoever to say that rape is "deeply, morally wrong" but that rapists should have access to victims they can rape? Of course not. By affirming that contraception is "immoral," Santorum supported the Roman Catholic Church's medieval position, but he immediately waffled his way into grievous error by not calling for severe penalties for such "immorality."

Santorum also called contraception a "grave moral wrong" on CNN's The Situation Room, but once again waffled when he called Rush Limbaugh "absurd" for castigating  a female law student who supported women's access to contraceptives. "He's being absurd, but that's you know, an entertainer can be absurd," Santorum told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. But if contraception is a "grave moral wrong," Rush Limbaugh would be correct to castigate women who resort to contraception in defiance of God's will that they have babies as he and nature command.

Rick Santorum makes no sense. American women make perfect sense, because they believe they have the right to decide whether or not to become mothers and don't consider contraception to be a sin or a crime. But if Santorum really believes that only God can determine when babies are to be born, making contraception a sin, then he should take the morally correct stand and call for charges to be brought against anyone who practices contraception, or dispenses contraceptives.

Is Santorum really a Christian? Does he really believe in and obey the Bible? The Bible clearly says that Christians should tithe ten percent of their earnings. But according to Santorum's 2010 tax returns, he gave a scant 1.76 percent of his income to charity, compared to President Obama’s 14.2 percent. Who, then, is the better Christian, and who is only hypocritically moralizing, holding other people to higher standards than himself?

Rick Santorum's Dark Visions of God

Santorum also reminds me of Pat Robertson, who regularly accuses the victims of natural disasters of having done something to piss God off, thus deserving lives full of suffering and agonizing deaths. But if this type of theological "thinking" is correct, God would be terribly unjust because completely innocent babies, children and animals suffer and die in natural disasters. It is a terrible crime for men to kill babies and children, so how can God murder them for things they didn't do and be considered loving, wise, compassionate or just? Most Americans prefer to believe better things about the victims (who obviously didn't deserve their fate) and God (who, if he exists, perhaps doesn't control the weather everywhere on the planet on a second-by-second basis). But, like Robertson, Santorum seems to harbor dark visions of an angry, judgmental God. Since due to his Roman Catholic upbringing Santorum believes that God loathes contraception and non-procreational sex, it is perhaps natural for him to worry that the United States will go the way of the dodo if its citizens keep antagonizing God by having sex for intimacy and pleasure. But what if he's wrong about God? And what sort of bizarre things might he do as president, under the influence of such dark visions? And how will his disdain for the morals and beliefs of the 99% of Americans who disagree with him affect his administration, if he's elected?

As David Brooks pointed out recently, Santorum thinks "theologically" and "dwells on the negative," on "tragedies" and "threats." That makes him the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan, an eternal optimist with a naturally sunny disposition and a can-do attitude. Ronald Reagan was a man of faith, but unlike Santorum, he didn't inject a repressive form of medieval religion into every aspect of his politics.

Separation of Church and State Gives Rick Santorum the Willies

I will give Santorum this: at least he's honest about his beliefs. For instance, he recently confessed that he wanted to vomit at the idea of separation of church and state, as expressed in this excerpt from a 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America ... where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all ... I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

Santorum said that JFK's speech made him want to "throw up." He also insisted that separation of church and state was "not the founders' vision." I find two things very wrong about Santorum's disgust with JFK's speech, which in my opinion is right on the money.

First, JFK's main point was that religion not should impose its views on government, and that government should not impose its views upon religion. That, in effect, requires separation of church and state. Most Americans, or at least the thinking ones who believe in fair play, agree with this "wall of separation" because they don't want other people's religious beliefs affecting their churches, or their right not to belong to any church if they so choose. The best way to implement true religious freedom is via a secular government "insulated" from religious organizations like the Vatican and Southern Baptist Convention. The government can ban certain harmful religious practices such as human sacrifice, but should not infringe on any non-harmful religious practices. This is the very reasonable system designed and implemented by the American founding fathers. Indeed, it was Thomas Jefferson, the main author of the Declaration of Independence, who coined the phrase "wall of separation" to describe the founders' system, which he helped create, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist association in 1802.

As it was for JFK, religion was a very personal and private matter for Jefferson, who obviously knew what he and the other founding fathers were doing, and why they separated government from religion, and religion from government. So why would Rick Santorum express such disgust at the idea of separation of church and state? From all that I've heard him say himself, my educated guess is that he actually wants to legislate a "more correct Christian morality" (i.e., his personal version), which would mean banning not only all forms of abortion and contraception, but even sex for non-procreational purposes such as intimacy and pleasure! This would of course force American women to abstain from sex altogether, or be continually barefoot and pregnant until they reach menopause.

Isn't it wrong for patriarchal men to condemn women to become servile baby factories?

Second, it is incredibly foolish to say that separation of church and state was "not the founder's vision." (More than one person who has worked closely with Santorum has called him an idiot, in slightly more polite terms, and no one who has worked closely with him has endorsed him for president, which should tell us something about his intellectual capabilities, or lack thereof.) The main founding fathers—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, et al—were educated, enlightened men. They had read their Bibles and knew full well that the first commandment was "Thou shalt have no other gods before me [Yahweh/Jehovah]." They knew that the second commandment was not to worship any other gods, or to make any graven images whatsoever [even of animals, because such images might lead to idolatry]." The third commandment was not to take the Lord's name [Yahweh/Jehovah] in vain." The fourth commandment was to observe the Sabbath and refrain from working on it.

Now, if the founding fathers had meant for the United States to be a Christian nation based on the ten commandments, they would obviously have enforced the first four commandments, mentioning the names Jehovah and Jesus Christ in the Constitution, while making sure that no other gods were worshipped by Americans, that no graven images were ever made (which would have prohibited images on coins and currency), that the name Jehovah was never used in vain, and that every American observed the Sabbath. But of course they did no such things. The first four commandments are completely incompatible with religious freedom and freedom of individual conscience. Why did the founding fathers choose to ignore these commandments? Because none of the main authors of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were orthodox Christians. While they did have personal beliefs in God, they didn't believe large parts of the Bible because they had actually read it and knew that it commanded all sorts of evil things, such as stoning boys for being "stubborn" and girls for being raped. So they took Saint Paul's advice and "rightly divided" the Bible, only considering the parts of the Bible that made sense to them.

George Washington attended Christian churches but didn't believe in the divinity of Christ, refused to take communion, and never mentioned Jesus in any of the thousands of letters he wrote, including some to his children on matters of faith and ethics. Thomas Jefferson didn't believe in the divinity of Christ, and while occupying the White House he snipped out the parts of his Bible that he didn't believe were true, including the miracles of Jesus. Benjamin Franklin was a deist. John Adams admired certain Christian ethics but didn't believe in the divinity of Christ. According to the orthodox Christians of their day, the best-known founding fathers were "infidels." But if they were infidels it was because they had actually read and studied their Bibles, and knew the texts were far from "infallible."

The main founding fathers were enlightened men and free thinkers. So was JFK. But Rick Santorum seems to have the religious beliefs of a medieval inquisitor, so it's really not surprising that he violently disagrees with them.

It's hard to imagine two presidential candidates more different than Kennedy and Santorum. JFK never tried to impose his Catholic beliefs or personal morals on his fellow Americans. But Santorum seems incapable of not imposing his religious beliefs and morals on other people. And his animosity towards the Protestant branch of Christianity for not agreeing with him on matters of sex, contraception and reproduction seems self-evident, especially since the resurfacing of his 2008 speech at Ave Maria college, in which he accused "mainstream, mainline Protestantism" of having been so deluded by "the Father of Lies" that Protestants in their "vanity" and "pride" are no longer really Christians. (The complete quotation appears later on this page.) This amazingly intolerant attitude probably explains why Santorum recently accused Barack Obama of "phony theology" and refused to correct a heckler who accused the President of not being a Christian. After all, according to Santorum, only people who agree with him are "real" Christians; everyone else is either deluded by, or following, the Devil.

Rick Santorum, Elitist

Who is the elitist, really?

Santorum routinely attacks the "elite" but seems incapable of understanding that he can only afford to have seven children because he's a very wealthy man. Most Americans aren't nearly as well-off, and simply can't afford to have however many babies nature dictates. When Santorum condemns American women to have children they can't afford to feed, house, clothe and educate, he comes off as an arrogant, moralizing, uncaring elitist.

While Santorum hopefully represents a political cult of one in the bizarre extremity of his views, it hasn't escaped informed Americans' notice that the GOP has been going after women's rights like a pit bull after a wounded dove. Actress/comedian Sandra Bernhard recently remarked that the “anti-women rhetoric now being pushed by the Republican Party represents ‘a whole new level of ignorance’ that is unprecedented in history.” She was reacting to Santorum’s statements that states can legally ban contraceptives and that birth control is "not okay." Other Republicans are less vocal about the "sin" aspect of contraception, but are legislating against women's reproductive rights nonetheless. Bernhard suggested that the GOP's anti-women rhetoric will lead to Democrats taking the back the House. Considering the current irrational state of the Republican Party, I certainly hope she's right, although I was a Reagan Republican in the days before the GOP lost its marbles.

As conservative Presbyterian blogger John Schroeder pointed out, Santorum’s “truly intolerant comments concerning Obama pretty well disqualify him from holding office. It is simply not the president’s job to be judging whose theology is correct and whose is not.”

But Santorum isn't content with just judging other people's religious beliefs. His hatred and loathing of sex for non-procreational purposes causes him to boil over with anger for the vast majority of Americans. For instance, in a 2008 “Press & People of Faith in Politics” forum, Santorum proclaimed that the entire Democratic Party is about sex for pleasure, which he equates with abortion and homosexuality:

Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become … They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality …
—Rick Santorum

Dare I point out that homosexuals don't have abortions? Or that most Republicans believe that it's perfectly fine for two adults to have consensual sex for purposes of intimacy and pleasure? But Rick Santorum obviously disagrees, as his publicly-expressed disdain for Protestantism demonstrates.

Amazingly, Santorum seems to lump everyone who doesn't fear sex the way he does into one homogenous "liberal" and "deluded by Lucifer" crowd. To Santorum the Satan worshippers are truly legion, and are leading our nation morally astray—not just the liberals and moderates, but also the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, et al, and even those Catholics who (gasp!) use contraceptives and have sex when they're not trying to make babies.

As Nicole Lashomb, editor-in-chief of The Rainbow Times, recently wrote: "The views of Rick Santorum are fundamentally radical to say the least. What concerns me the most is how exuberantly he professes his religious beliefs as the ultimate way to lead the American people—so much for religious freedom. In recent interviews and reports, Santorum has referenced the Bible as the most essential way to govern our nation."

The problem with using the Bible to govern is not only that no two people agree on its proper interpretation, but also that it contains many verses that either command or condone racism, slavery, sex slavery, religious intolerance, sexism, homophobia, and the worst crimes known to mankind: matricide, infanticide, ethnic cleansing and genocide. American plantation owners once used the Bible to justify slavery. German Christians once used the Bible to justify the Holocaust. Today the Bible is being actively used by many Jews and Christians to excuse the inexcusable things being done to millions of completely innocent Palestinian mothers and children by the government of Israel. Anyone who has read the Bible honestly, and has studied the history of Christianity honestly, knows that the Bible can easily be used to inflict all sorts of horrors on innocents. While religious freedom may be a wonderful thing in theory, in the real world it is vitally important to make sure that our government remains secular and is protected from the excesses of religious sects which periodically go mad. Even if your chosen religion is the cat's meow, there is no guarantee that everyone else's will be. Thus, we really do need separation of church and state.

Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.
—John F. Kennedy

The American founding fathers had seen the results of Old World holy wars and inquisitions prior to 1776, and so they wisely designed a system with walls of separation between church and state. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy believed in those walls, and honored them. Rick Santorum clearly doesn't, and that makes him perhaps the most dangerous man in American politics today. If he gets elected president, then Protestants finally figure out that he considers them to be Devil worshippers, we might end up with the first American holy war.

And it seems obvious that Santorum despises and fears education as much as he despises and fears Protestantism. This probably makes a weird kind of sense, because increasing education usually increases tolerance, which is not what Santorum wants. Here is one of the wackier things Santorum has said about higher education recently:

President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob! There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard everyday and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor that [tries] to indoctrinate them.
—Rick Santorum

First, I'm sure President Obama didn't say that he wanted to force all Americans to go to college. Rather, he obviously meant that he wanted to give every American the opportunity to go to college. Does believing in a vital part of the American dream, equal opportunity for everyone, make him a snob? But it's the tail end of Santorum's remark that raises red flags for me. Santorum has made it clear that he believes American colleges and mainstream Protestantism are both "under the influence of the Devil," and that they are indoctrinating young people into "liberal" beliefs. I think we must assume that, if elected president, Santorum will actually try to pass legislation forcing Americans to conform to his medieval vision of "proper morality."

Chris Christie, the popular Republican governor of New Jersey, recently rebuked Santorum, saying: “Every kid doesn’t want to go to college, but I think we should aspire to let every child reach his maximum or her maximum potential, and I certainly don’t think the president’s a snob for saying that.”

And if eagerness to talk about something suggests willingness to put plans in motion, it seems quite possible that a Santorum administration would produce hyperkinetic whirlwinds of legislation aimed at sweeping more freethinking Americans back to the Dark Ages. When it comes to sex, contraception and reproduction, Santorum has an extreme case of OCD. Joe Klein recently called it a "near Tourettic insistence on bringing up issues no one else wants to talk about." He just can't stop ranting about his favorite subjects. That inserts him in a Big Brother-ish way into our bedrooms, gynecologists' offices and maternity wards. Or, as Monique Ruffin put it in the title of her recent Huffington Post article, "Rick Santorum Has Got His Hand Up My Dress."

Santorum is not only against abortion, but clearly opposes contraceptives, the morning-after pill, prenatal testing, any form of sex that isn't specifically for purposes of procreation, and even mothers having jobs outside the baby factory. He obviously doesn't trust Protestants (and probably most Catholics, since they increasingly use contraceptives and have smaller families than in the past) to conform to the will of God. Over and over again he makes this perfectly clear, in a creepy Nixonian way. But his paranoia vastly eclipses Nixon's. The thing he fears even more than Protestantism is education, both of which according to him have been seduced by Satan. Santorum, whose name derives from the same Latin root as sanctimonious, recently told Glenn Beck: “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college,” because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that “harm” the country.

Santorum despises colleges, presumably because they teach students to think independently, which he refuses to do himself. Rather, he seems to claim to know the mind of God intuitively, since the Bible is silent on the subjects of abortion and contraception. Somehow, inexplicably, Santorum "knows" that human beings should breed mindlessly like rabbits, producing more and more babies for the greater glory of God, church and state. Yes, he really does say such things, and seldom obliquely.

What you have with me is "what you see is what you get."
—Rick Santorum

Okay, he's consistent, but what if he's consistently, mind-numbingly wrong? After all, ultra-conservative Christians have been very sure about other things in the past, such as God wanting them to rule the world, to fight holy wars, to convert people at swordpoint, to own slaves, and to burn women at the stake as witches. Were they right on any of those other counts? How many of the poor women they tortured and killed really had supernatural powers?

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rick Santorum's main claim to fame and the presidency of the United States is that he is consistently a conservative Christian. But being consistently wrong on major issues is not a positive attribute. After all, the leaders of the Confederacy were conservative Christians who were stupendously and stupidly consistent in their religious beliefs and politics. They had read their Bibles, and as Jefferson Davis pointed out to abolitionists, the Bible clearly commands and condones slavery from Genesis to Revelation, making slavery a "Divine decree." And while it was not discussed in public—probably because their wives would have shot their testicles off—southern plantation owners had also read and obviously believed those Bible verses which clearly endorse sex slavery, because there were many lighter-skinned slaves prior to the Civil War. White masters who raped their slaves could invoke Bible verses that allow fathers to sell their daughters as sex slaves. According to the Bible, a slaveowner could rape his female slaves, then sell his own children to other men so that when they grew up, his daughters could also be raped. (Exodus 21:7-11, Deuteronomy 20:10-14, Deuteronomy 21:10-14, Deuteronomy 22:28-29, Judges 5:30, Judges 21:10-24, 2 Samuel 12:11-14, Zechariah 14:1-2)

Any Christian with a shred of compassion and an iota of a sense of justice has to take such verses with a grain of salt, and cannot possibly suggest that the entire Bible is the "infallible" word of an all-loving, all-wise, all-just God. Obviously the more heinous verses (and there are others which command the worst crimes known to man, including infanticide, matricide, ethnic cleansing and genocide) must have had human origins. Thus for all Christians it becomes necessary to "rightly divide the Word," as Saint Paul advised his star pupil, Timothy, discarding all verses that are unworthy of consideration, much less belief. But is there any evidence that Rick Santorum has ever put on his "thinking cap" and questioned the source of his belief that sex is only morally justified when procreation is the goal, and that using contraceptives is "not okay" (his words), meaning that women must either abstain from sex or remain continually barefoot and pregnant until they reach menopause?

It really does seem that Santorum has his hand up the dresses of American women, and his eye at the peephole of their bedrooms. And it's not just Santorum, although he is undoubtedly the worst of the lot. As Maureen Dowd suggested recently, GOP now stands for Ghastly Outdated Party. Its presidential candidates "pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it."

“It [the candidates’ Stone Age attitude toward women and gays].makes the party look like it isn’t a modern party,” Rudy Giuliani recently told CNN’s Erin Burnett, fretting that the GOP “doesn’t understand the modern world that we live in.” That's an understatement if I've ever heard one.

Jeb Bush, the man many conservatives hoped might be the party's White Knight, understands the GOP's deep-seated problems: “I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering. I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”

Other voices of reason, comparatively speaking, are also aware that the GOP has seemingly lost its way, and perhaps its marbles. Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently called Santorum “rigid and homophobic.” Arlen Specter, who left the Republican party to become a Democrat, told MSNBC: “Where you have Senator Santorum’s views, so far to the right, with his attitude on women in the workplace and gays and the bestiality comments and birth control, I do not think it is realistic for Rick Santorum to represent America.”

And what about Santorum's recent avowal of "enhanced interrogation" methods (i.e., torture)? Santorum disparaged John McCain, who actually experienced torture "up close and personal" during his days as a POW in Vietnam, and doesn't believe torture is justified or effective. Mark Salter, a McCain aide, responded, "Ron Paul may be the wackiest candidate in the GOP field. But for pure, blind stupidity nobody beats Santorum. In my twenty years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member, which he reminded me of today."

Where did the GOP's and Santorum's vastly strange ideas originate? Some of the men who gave us the Bible were obviously wrong about slavery, about slaughtering women and babies in the name of  God, about stoning boys to death for being "stubborn," and about selling girls who had been raped to their rapists as sex slaves so that they could be raped "legally" the rest of their lives. So isn't it just possible that they were also wrong about human beings needing to breed mindlessly, like rabbits? Some animals need to breed prodigiously because most of their offspring die early deaths. Thankfully, this is not the case for human beings, so our need to procreate is not as urgent. In fact, we now have the opposite problem, and need to be careful not to overwhelm the earth with our ever-increasing numbers.

It also seems quite possible that some of the writers of the Bible were wrong about religious intolerance. Here, too, one must question whether Rick Santorum is really "thinking," because he recently dismissed President Obama's faith as a "phony theology" that is not "based on the Bible." This seems to have been a religion-inspired attack that resulted because President Obama wants to address the problems presented by global warming. Polar ice caps and glaciers are obviously melting and receding, causing sea levels to inexorably rise. This endangers low-lying islands and coastal plains, and perhaps higher elevations as well. But Santorum denies the evidence of rising sea levels, calling global warming "political science." And he doesn't stop there. He also dismisses the faith of around 45 million American Protestants, accusing them of being deluded by the Devil.

In a speech he made Ave Maria College in 2008, Santorum dismissed the faith of Protestants as false, deluded, vain piousness, saying that Satan ("the Father of Lies") had infiltrated the Protestant religion and that "mainstream, mainline Protestantism" is now in "shambles" and is no longer Christian. According to Santorum, "Once the colleges fell, and those who were being educated in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘Well, wait, the Catholic Church?’ No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic, but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic. Sure, the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic. Mainstream, mainline Protestantism. And of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is a shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious — to use both vanity and pride to go after the Church."

So there you have it. Rich Santorum, a one-man Council of Trent, has abandoned religious tolerance and returned to the Dark Ages. He arrogantly presumes that the Holy Roman Catholic Church is the only true church, and that Protestants have been deluded to believe that they are people of faith, when in fact they are full of vanity and pride, the hallmarks of the Devil. What will millions of Protestant voters think of Santorum, when they finally discover what he thinks about them and their faith?

Santorum fails to mention that before the United States was founded on the principle of religious freedom, the Holy Roman Catholic Church had been torturing Protestant "heretics" and burning them at the stake over points of religious dogma. (Granted, when Protestants like the Puritans gained power, they sometimes reacted in kind, but the precedent was set by the Catholic Church.) If there is omniscient demon intent on creating mayhem on Earth, would he be more likely to want religious toleration and freedom, or for Christians to torture and murder each other, and people of other faiths? Would he want want human beings to have safe, protected sex, or to die agonizing deaths from AIDS because they were afraid to use condoms? Would he want adults to only have babies when they were ready to assume the responsibilities of parenthood, or would he want them to breed mindlessly like rabbits, overpopulating the earth? It is hard for me to understand how Santorum can suggest that Protestants are "deluded by Satan" when most American Catholics no longer believe that using condoms and other contraceptives is a "sin," or that human beings must have as many babies as their bodies are capable of producing.

But Santorum doesn't stop with dismissing other people's faith out of hand. He actually seems to believe that if Americans don't adopt his version of Christianity, the result will be that "we are headed down that road [to beheadings]." He said this while trying to draw a connection between American women being given access to contraceptives against the wishes of the Vatican, to people being decapitated during the French Revolution.

Ironically, Rick Santorum sounds like one of the rabble rousers who incited people to such much irrational violence during the French Revolution. No one has suggested that American women be forced to use contraceptives, only that they be given access to contraceptives if they elect to use them voluntarily. Around 92% of Americans, including the majority of Catholics, believe using contraceptives is perfectly acceptable, probably one of the highest percentages of agreement in American politics and religion today. But Santorum has said publicly that using contraceptives is "not okay" and that marriage and sex are only valid when procreation is the goal. He has even made statements that make it sound as if he wants to outlaw not only contraceptives, but non-procreative sex! That puts him in a very flaky minority and explains why he has seven children. Other equally bizarre comments of his, which you can read on this page, make him seem like a lunatic cult of one.

It takes around a quarter million dollars to raise a child these days, and most couples are overworked and underpaid, thanks to the "trickle down economics" of millionaire politicians like Santorum, who always favor their rich friends over the 99%. So it makes perfect sense for Americans to use contraceptives. Yes, we all understand that the chauvinistic, autocratic Vatican would prefer for women to remain barefoot, pregnant and in abject submission to men, but most of us no longer believe this is the "will of God." And even if it is, most of us can't afford homes large enough to hold a dozen or more children, so the point is basically moot.

If Catholic employers can refuse to give their employees access to contraceptives, then Christian Scientists, faith healers and witchdoctors should be able to avoid giving their employees any healthcare at all. Any business that wanted to avoid healthcare costs altogether could claim a "religious objection" to modern medicine, citing the Bible verse that says, "Thy faith shall make thee whole." Pedophiles could claim the right to have sex with children. Polygamists could claim the right to have multiple spouses. Jews could claim the right to kill Gentiles and steal their land and property, since this is what the great Biblical "heroes" Moses, Joshua, Caleb and King David did, according to the Bible. Obviously, if we allow flaky religious beliefs to trump the law of the land, we will immediately have complete chaos. It makes much more sense to say that Americans have religious freedom, as long as they obey the law.

Today as I write this article, many conservatives are cheering Rick Santorum’s victories in three Republican primaries: Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. But I wonder how many of them will continue to applaud when they finally realize that Santorum has the puritanical beliefs and tyrannical attitude of a medieval inquisitor? Or that he not only denies the existence of Palestinians, but even the existence of the American middle class? Despite the altogether obvious stratification of Americans along economic lines, which has resulted in the 1% getting richer and richer while nearly everyone else heads in the opposite direction down a long, slippery, perilous slope, Santorum insists that "there are no classes in America." Once the people in power deny your existence and thus your rights, you can expect to suffer, just as Palestinians are now suffering because the leaders of Israel and the U.S. refuse to acknowledge the completely obvious fact that they really do exist and thus deserve equal human rights and justice. To deny the existence of a Palestinian farmer is to deny the existence and human rights of his wife and children. To deny the existence and rights of middle- and lower-income-class Americans is to jeopardize their children's rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Mitt Romney said nearly the same thing as Santorum when he claimed not to be worried about the very rich and the very poor. If the very rich and the very poor have the same problems (obviously they don't), then everyone really is the same and we live in a classless society. But this is obvious balderdash. The super-rich have every advantage over other Americans, and every American with a brain knows it. Rich, influential conservatives want to "conserve" the status quo, which means keeping things the same, because it favors them and their friends. Since they can't deny the altogether obvious problems, they try to shift the blame from themselves to more vulnerable targets. We know from history that oppressors always demonize their victims. White supremacists demonized Native Americans and African Americans: guess what happened to them? Jews and Christians demonize Palestinians: look at what's happened to them. Now the 1% have shifted the blame to the 99%, and look what's happening to us.

Today Republicans like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romeny are coming for Palestinians, union workers, teachers, homosexuals, Muslims, darker-skinned legal immigrants, poor black schoolchildren, girls and women who aren't ready to become mothers, the elderly, the sick and the unemployed. But never doubt that they have all the 99% squarely in their sights. While they pretend to be "Christians" because that gets them votes and millions of dollars in campaign contributions, the simple fact is that Jesus, the apostles and the Hebrew prophets called for compassion for the poor and said the rich should help rather than oppress them. But the true faith of these far-right, far-out "Christians" is social and economic Darwinism: the survival of the strongest and most ruthless at the expense of everyone else. This is why they refuse to repeal tax cuts for the super-rich while constantly talking about slashing "entitlements" for everyone else, even though those "entitlements" were funded out of payroll taxes withheld from the paychecks of working Americans. I have contributed large sums of money to Social Security and Medicare over the decades I've worked. Who the hell are these millionaires to now say that I am seeking "entitlements" when what I really want is a fair deal for everyone, including myself?

Santorum looks like a freshly scrubbed choirboy, but appearances can be deceiving. If he becomes president and his words are any indication of his future actions (as words usually are), Santorum will actively legislate against not only all forms of abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, but also against all or most forms of contraception and perhaps even the "naughtier" forms of sex.

The name Santorum derives from Sanctus, the Italian word for "saint." But it's important to remember that not so very long ago Roman Catholic "saints" were torturing women and burning them at the stake as "witches." People who opposed the inquisitors could be tortured to obtain confessions, then burned at the stake as "heretics." For instance, Thomas More, the Catholic "saint" who wrote Utopia, sent "heretics" to be burned at the stake. Rick Santorum may have the face of a choirboy, but his words reveal the worldview of a fierce autocrat who thinks human beings should only have sex in order to produce babies for God, church and state.

Santorum is so far right that he makes Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush look like flaming liberals. After all, they never suggested that the government should pry into the sex lives of American citizens, or deny them the right to buy and use contraceptives. But Santorum has made it perfectly clear that he not only subscribes to "be fruitful and multiply" but also to the Roman Catholic dogma that sex is only morally justifiable when procreation is the goal.

Jon Stewart recently poked fun at Santorum, in a comedic piece titled "The Vagina Ideologues." I think "The Vagina Moron-ologues" might be more apt. Or perhaps "The Hole-y Wars." Like Cartman, Rick Santorum demands, "Respect my authority!" But that authority comes not from the Bible (which says nothing about contraception), but from the Pope, a man unwise enough to sentence millions of children around the globe to death by calling it a "sin" to use condoms.

It's scary to think that someone gullible enough to believe such child-killing evil nonsense might become president of the United States.

Does it matter what presidents believe? Yes, it does. Andrew Jackson was a white supremacist who despised Native Americans. When he became president, he acted on his beliefs and forced innocents to walk the Trail of Tears. Richard Nixon was a paranoiac who thought everyone was out to "get" him, so he used government agencies to spy on his political opponents and engineered the Watergate break-in. Thus, the beliefs of presidents obviously do matter.

Perhaps the best way to determine what Santorum would do as president is to examine what he’s said publicly.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Santorum opined that mutually consenting adults do not have a right to privacy in bed, saying, "[The] right to privacy ... doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution." He also compared homosexuality with "man on child" and "man on dog," causing the interviewer to say that Santorum was "freaking" her out. He furthermore said, " ... [if] you have the right to consensual [gay] sex ... then you have the right to ... adultery." But of course most Americans think their sex lives are their own business and don’t want the government dictating what they can do in bed.

Santorum wants state governments to legislate the limits of human desires and passions: "The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire." He thinks our desires are too dangerous for us to be trusted with them.

"This [gay marriage] is an issue just like 9-11. We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law?" Rick Santorum, comparing legalizing same-sex marriage to the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

In his Philadelphia Inquirer column, Santorum asked, "Is anyone saying same-sex couples can't love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too?" Either Santorum is admitting that he has a "thing" for his brother and his mother-in-law, or he is admitting that he is a homophobe.

Santorum wants to ban contraceptives: "One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is ... the dangers of contraception. ... It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is [sic] counter to how things are supposed to be." In other words, Americans should have sex in the missionary position and breed like rabbits, or give up sex altogether. But around 99 percent of sexually active American women have used some form of birth control, and "helping people get access to birth control" is supported by 82 percent of Americans. Santorum is virtually a cult of one, along with the aptly named Pope Benedict (who actually held the renamed office of the Grand Inquisitor before becoming pope).

 "The state has a right to do that [outlaw contraceptives], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statutes they have. That is the thing I have said about the activism of the Supreme Court, they are creating right, and they should be left up to the people to decide." Rick Santorum, declaring that states have the right to outlaw all forms of birth control. But if states can outlaw birth control on Catholic religious grounds, why can't Christian Scientists outlaw all health care, since they don't believe in it? Why can't faith healers make it illegal for Americans to seek any kind of of medical care, other than paying them for a laying on of hands? How can anyone seriously suggest that in the modern world, flaky religious beliefs should be able to trump reason?

"This [the government making contraceptives available to women by law] is simply someone trying to impose their values on somebody else, with the arm of the government doing so. That should offend everybody, people of faith and no faith that the government could get on a roll that is that aggressive." But Santorum has spoken repeatedly about forcing all Americans to obey God's will and God's laws, as Santorum interprets them. The new Obama healthcare legislation doesn't force anyone to use contraceptives. But Santorum clearly wants to deny all American women access to contraceptives, because of his religious beliefs on contraception, which are not shared by most Americans. So who is trying to impose his values on whom, really?

"We have Judeo-Christian values that are based on biblical truth. ... And those truths don't change just because people's attitudes may change." But according to "biblical truth," fathers should be able to sell their own daughters as sex slaves, with the option to buy them back if they don't "please" their new masters [Exodus 21]. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is wrong about slavery. So who's to say that the writers of the Bible weren't also wrong about women's rights?

 "I believe that any doctor that performs an abortion, I would advocate that any doctor that performs an abortion, should be criminally charged for doing so." Rick Santorum, saying that doctors should be arrested if they help women and girls deal with unwanted pregnancies due to rape and incest, or if they help end pregnancies that threaten the lives of pregnant women and girls.

"In far too many families with young children, both parents are working ... Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism." (from Santorum's book It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good). Of course women working has nothing to do with family values, needing to put bread on the table, or (gasp!) the desire to do productive things ... only Rick Santorum in his godly wisdom is able to see that "radical feminism" is the root of all evil, replacing the love of money.

After the South Carolina primary, Santorum said "Game on! ... Thank God for those [Americans] who cling to their guns and their Bibles."

Santorum again: "The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical ... What I'm talking about is onward American soldiers. What we're talking about are core American values." But during the Crusades the Catholic church’s armies invaded the Middle East and massacred multitudes of Jews and Muslims. How, exactly, does murdering people of different races and creeds reflect "American values"?

Echoing Newt Gingrich, Santorum recently denied the human rights of millions of completely innocent Palestinian women and children, saying: "There is no ‘Palestinian.’ " This is the type of racist "thinking" that led to 9/11 and two decade-long wars.

Santorum is not content with unnecessary wars in the Middle East and also wants to go to war with more than a billion Chinese citizens as well: "I don’t want to go to a trade war, I want to beat China. I want to go to war with China and make America the most attractive place in the world to do business."

During a campaign stop in Iowa, Santorum said, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money." Like Newt Gingrich, he insults African Americans while pretending to want to help them, by suggesting that poor black people have a lesser work ethic than other poor people.

Santorum favors torture: "I mean the fact is that some of this information that we have found out that led to Usama bin Laden actually came from these enhanced interrogation techniques." Bu what would he say if non-Christians were torturing American soldiers, I wonder?

Santorum, sounding every bit as confused as George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, asked, "Would the potential attraction to Mormonism by simply having a Mormon in the White House threaten traditional Christianity by leading more Americans to a church that some Christians believe misleadingly calls itself Christian, is an active missionary church, and a dangerous cult?" Well, if having irrational ideas and evangelizing them constitutes a dangerous cult, Rick Santorum is the likeliest candidate to head such an endeavor.

In an interview with CNS News, Santorum said, "The question is — and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer — is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no. Well if that person — human life is not a person, then — I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'We're going to decide who are people and who are not people.'" Despite the fact that millions of white Americans are pro-choice, Santorum elects to play the race card against President Obama.

 "I believe the earth gets warmer and I also believe the earth gets cooler. And I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man, through the production of CO2 — which is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the man-made part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas — is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you consider all the other factors." Like many conservative Christians, Santorum denies the evidence of evolution and global warming, which means he threatens the lives of our children and grandchildren by refusing to confront and deal with facts.

"Suffering, if you’re a Christian, suffering is a part of life. And it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life … There are all different ways to suffer. One way to suffer is through lack of food and shelter and there’s another way to suffer which is lack of dignity and hope and there’s all sorts of ways that people suffer and it’s not just tangible, it’s also intangible and we have to consider both." Rick Santorum, saying that Americans should suffer because suffering is good, which is one of the many irrational ideas of Roman Catholicism

"I support the Ryan budget plan. I think it’s the right direction on the major points. I can’t say I’ve read all of it, but on the major thrust of what he’s doing, I support what he wants to do with Medicare, Medicaid. The only thing I would do, frankly, as I’ve said publicly many times, I think we should implement a lot of these things sooner than what he’s suggesting." Rick Santorum, supporting the Paul Ryan plan to kill Medicare and Medicaid, even though this would be a death sentence for many elderly and disabled Americans.

 "Yeah, remember, under the Bush administration, welfare — I mean, excuse me, poverty among African Americans and among single unmarried women, poverty was at the lowest rate ever in the history of this country. So Obama’s policies are not working, Bush polices worked! For long a time as a matter of fact." Rick Santorum, falsely claiming that poverty was the lowest in history because of Bush policies. In fact, poverty increased during the Bush administration.

Santorum is a cult of one in American politics, and a man so far removed from American ideals of personal freedom and individual conscience that he has no business trying to mind ours. He would strive to turn Americans into serfs subject to medieval beliefs and continue our nation's headlong rush toward World War III. He is a Christian right-wing zealot who would force women to bear unwanted children, outlaw homosexuality, tell unmarried couples what they can and cannot do in bed, condemn senior citizens to poverty, and force Americans into more unnecessary, unwinnable wars.

To further demonstrate this, here are excerpts from a CounterPunch article about Santorum:

The Mullah Omar of Pennsylvania
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Rick Santorum had only been in the senate for a few weeks when Bob Kerrey, then Senator from Nebraska, pegged him: "Santorum, that’s Latin for asshole." It was probably the funniest line the grim Kerrey ever uttered and it was on the mark, too.

Such a stew of sleazy self-righteousness and audacious stupidity has not been seen in the senate since the days of Steve Symms, the celebrated moron from Idaho. In 1998, investigative reporter Ken Silverstein fingered Santorum as the dumbest member of congress in a story for The Progressive. Considering the competition, that’s an achievement of considerable distinction.

Even Santorum’s staff knows the senator is a vacuous boob prone to outrageous gaffs and crude outbursts of unvarnished bigotry. For years, they kept him firmly leashed, rarely permitting him to attend a press interview without a senior staffer by his side. They learned the hard way. While in serving in the House, Santorum was asked by a reporter to explain why his record on environmental policy was so dreadful. Santorum replied by observing that the environment was of little consequence in God’s grand plan. "Nowhere in the Bible does it say that America will be here 100 years from now." The reference was to the Rapture, which apparently is impending.

Santorum is the self-anointed prophet of family values on the Hill, who issues frequent jeremiads on the threats Hollywood fare poses to the "fabric of American culture." Of course, these sermons are hard to swallow from a man with Santorum’s resume. After all, before entering Congress Santorum worked as a lobbyist. His top client? The World Wrestling Federation.

But now the Republican leadership, apparently cruising along in self-destruct mode, has elevated Santorum to the number three spot in the senate and his staff can’t run interference for him anymore. The results have been comically predictable. Six months ago, Santorum penned an op-ed for a Christian paper blaming the sexual molestation scandals in the Catholic Church on "the culture of liberalism." Surely, an omen that the senator from Pennsylvania wasn’t quite ready for prime time.

So it came to pass that on April 7 [2003], Santorum sat down for an interview with AP reporter Lara Jordan ...

After a brisk discussion of the degeneracy of American culture, the interview turned to the subject of the pending Supreme Court case on sodomy laws. Like most religious zealots, Santorum is obsessed not just with homosexuals but with visualizing the postures and physical mechanics of homosexual love. He seized on her question with an enthusiasm many Republicans reserve for discussions of the tax code.

"I have no problem with homosexuality," Santorum pronounced. "I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who’s homosexual. If that’s their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it’s not the person, it’s the person’s actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions."

In the past, one of Santorum’s staffers would have found some way to interrupt the interview and deftly muzzle the senator. But he was flying solo and evidently trying to impress Ms. Jordan with his encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Krafft-Ebbing. Note the senator’s excited and flirtatious tone.

AP: OK, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue that they should not have sex?

SANTORUM: We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that [have] sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold – Griswold was the contraceptive case – and abortion. And now we’re just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you – this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it’s my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that’s antithetical to strong, healthy families. Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, where it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. 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, even the unnerved reporter tried to rein in Santorum. "I’m sorry," Jordan interjected. "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."

But the man was on a roll and there was no stopping him. "And that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately," Santorum said. "The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we’re seeing it in our society."

There you have it. A case study in the politics of pathological homophobia ... Santorum, the Mullah Omar of Pennsylvania, is a ridiculous spectacle but he can’t be taken lightly. He is the slick-haired darling of the neo-cons, an obedient automaton that feverishly promotes their wildest fantasies without hesitation.

Undeterred by the First Amendment, Santorum says planning to introduce legislation that will limit criticism of Israel in colleges and universities that receive federal money.
And his passion for Israel is so profound that it obviates even his rancid homophobia. When it comes to the Middle East, liberal Democrats race to co-sponsor legislation with him. Most recently, Santorum and Barbara Boxer teamed up to introduce the Syria Accountability Act, which would inflict trade sanctions on Syria like those which gripped Iraq for 12 years, killing nearly one million children. Talk about family values.

Sure, Santorum is an asshole. But he’s not one of a kind.

Jeffrey St. Clair’s latest book is Born Under a Bad Sky. He is the co-editor of Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

Here is an article by Joe Conason that appeared in The National Memo on 2/16/12:

Rick Santorum: the 'Blue-Collar' One-Percenter
by JOE CONASON

Biography inspires many a presidential campaign, but exploiting the candidate’s life story is never without risk. While Rick Santorum uses his coal-mining roots to draw a striking contrast with the awkward one-percenter Mitt Romney, he can hardly claim to be the tribune of the working class. Indeed, he insists that "there are no classes in America" and accused Romney of indulging in "class warfare" merely for mentioning the "middle class." He boasts of his low ratings from labor and vows to outlaw public employee unions.

Santorum now portrays himself, with no small assistance from the campaign press corps, as the candidate of the Republican common man, the white working class conservative, who pays his taxes (however grudgingly) and seeks to save manufacturing jobs. But during all his years in Congress, his scores on labor and job issues rarely scored above 14 percent, since he usually rejected increases in the minimum wage or cutting tax breaks for companies that sent American factories offshore. Although his Republican adversaries now correctly accuse him of casting a few votes in favor of higher wages, he explains those as unavoidable political compromises with his deep ideological aversion to unions.

There is no reason to assume that Santorum is any less a servant of big money than Mr. Big Money himself, Mitt Romney. While still in the Senate, he maintained a "leadership PAC" that he rather misleadingly named "America’s Foundation," which served as a conduit for large contributions from corporate donors who wanted him to grease legislation for them. Most leadership PACs make donations to other politicians as a means of securing power and influence for their sponsors, but America’s Foundation served as a blatant slush fund for Santorum, with a huge proportion of its funds spent on personal expenses, restaurant bills, and credit cards. This operation was staffed by lobbyists and financed by companies that benefited directly from legislation pushed by the senator – sometimes sending big checks within days of passage of their pet bills.

As a Senator, he cultivated close relationships with the same kind of financiers with whom he now seeks to contrast himself. For instance, the suburban Virginia McMansion that the Santorums call home, subject of his recent complaints about its diminished value, was purchased with the help of a "private bank" in Philadelphia, against the bank’s own rules for providing mortgages solely to its investment clients. That was a curious deal, but not nearly as curious as the dubious "charity" that Santorum operated alongside his PAC – or the bills he pushed for tobacco and liquor interests while receiving large donations from their lobbyists. The most intriguing of all these deals was a coal-to-diesel plant for which Santorum helped to obtain $100 million in Energy Department subsidies – the same kind of "socialist" legislation he now denounces as a reborn Tea Party conservative.

All of that is why the watchdogs at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington listed Santorum as one of the four most corrupt Senators in 2006 – and why the Washington Post editorially mocked his role as chair of a "lobbying reform" effort for the Senate Republicans that same year, from which he quickly stepped down.
When Santorum lost his Senate seat in 2006, the most salient issue was his support of the Bush plan to privatize Social Security, in an ambitious scheme that would have siphoned a trillion dollars away from retirees, widows, and orphans to Wall Street bankers. Pennsylvania voters understood why that was a raw deal – and why any Senator who backed it was no friend of working families.

Here's are excerpts from an article in The New York Times:

Santorum’s Gospel of Inequality
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: February 17, 2012

"Santorum Praises Income Inequality."

That was Fox News’s headline about Rick Santorum’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday. Santorum said, "I’m not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been and, hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be."

Unbelievable. Maybe not, but stunning all the same.

Then again, Santorum is becoming increasingly unhinged in his public comments. Last week, he said that the president was arguing that Catholics would have to hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues. Also last week, he suggested that liberals and the president were leading religious people into oppression and even beheadings. I kid you not. Santorum said: "They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine."

Santorum went on to say about income inequality during his speech on Thursday: "We should celebrate like we do in the small towns all across America — as you do here in Detroit. You celebrate success. You build statues and monuments. Buildings, you name after them. Why? Because in their greatness and innovation, yes, they created wealth, but they created wealth for everybody else. And that’s a good thing, not something to be condemned in America."

Santorum might want to take a walk around Detroit to see who’s celebrating and to see how many statues he can find to honor people who simply invented something and got rich.

Furthermore, as a newspaperman and a former Detroiter, I’d like to direct him to the James J. Brady Memorial. Detroit1701.org, maintained by a University of Michigan emeritus professor, calls it "one of the more attractive memorials in Detroit." It pays tribute to Brady, a federal tax collector, who set out to address the issue of child poverty in the city by founding the Old Newsboys’ Goodfellows of Detroit Fund in 1914 — what is essentially a local welfare fund.

The group provides "warm clothing, toys, books, games and candy" to local children every Christmas in addition to sending poor children to summer camps, the dentist and to college.

Then again, charitable giving doesn’t appear to be high on Motor Mouth Santorum’s list of priorities. As The Washington Post pointed out, based on Santorum’s tax return disclosure this week, he has given the least amount to charity of the four presidential candidates who have disclosed their tax returns. (Ron Paul has not.) His charitable giving was just 1.8 percent of his adjusted gross income.

The Obamas were the highest, giving 14.2 percent, even though their income was second lowest.

Maybe that’s the imbalance we should praise.

The HyperTexts