But this is so brilliant, so succinct, so perfect an illustration of the level our political discourse had sunk to that I cannot with good intent pass on commenting on it. Here's the quote, from Charlie Pierce again, citing Rick Santorum on the evils of putting the totem pole in the donut hole without throwing the pregnancy dice (emphasis mine):
"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."Now sit back and think about that for a moment.
First of all, this man isn't running for stake president of the local Mormon outfit. He's not a cardinal hustling votes for the Papacy. He's supposed to be one of We the People, a citizen of a nation explicitly designed around not codifying religious dogma into civil law ("an establishment of religion") who is trying to convince you to vote for him as its Chief Executive.And this is part of his platform.
Second, consider the semantics of his statement; "do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be".
Obviously, for Santorum, it's how GOD wants them to be.
And this is...why?Why should we care what Santorum's Bible says? Or even what PART of it Santorum wants us to listen to.
My grandfather was a Salvation Army officer, and I'm as familiar with the Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments, as a heathen can be. And in my opinion there's a ton of stuff about sex, almost all of it archaic, almost all of it confusing, and none of it applicable to the job of the President of the United States.
There's all the old Hebrew stuff; "be fruitful and multiply", the Sin of Onan, but you'd expect that from a culture that demanded progeny due to the insane rate of death in infancy, childhood and childbirth.
But there is also some genuinely bizarre shit. Like how you're supposed to fuck your brother's widow? Or the etiquette for raping your female slaves? (Hint - make sure you have a spare ram around in case you get caught...).
In other words, there's all SORTS of ridiculous desert-wandering God-pesterer crap in the Bible, sexual or otherwise.
And that Rick Santorum cherry-picks some of it says more about him than it does about the Christian Bible.But that's kinda not the point, really, isn't it?
The point is that we're supposed to be living in a non-sectarian state, as in, you can't circumsize my daughter - or my son - because of what YOU believe. You don't get to decide whether my wife and I have kids when we have sex because YOU believe we should, or even if your GOD believes we should and tells you so. And we don't have to figure out what part of the Bible that's in; it's right in the Constitution.
That's really all there is to it.
And Rick Santorum doesn't believe this.
And Rick Santorum is not being laughed, reviled, and mocked off the public stage.
Rick Santorum is not being held up as a living example of the very dangers of theocracy by the sort of people who will swear to you that Muslims want you to live by sharia law.
No. Rick Santorum is being taken seriously as a Presidential candidate by the "news media" and by a significant number of people in one of our two major political parties.
Update 1/4: And the fact that this god-botherer pulled a quarter of the GOP vote - that between them this religious whackaloon who believes that it is the President's job to intone on what my wife and I do in bed and the goldbug who thinks that our country is still working under the Articles of Confederation pulled half the GOP electorate in Iowa - should tell you all you really need to know about our nation and why we are where we are today.We Are So Fucked.
13 comments:
Santorum spends too much time dwelling on sex and everything slightly related to sex. I think he is mentally ill.
By Santorum's own rules then, he or his wife, have decided seven kids are enough and Rick isn't getting any anymore.
He's a sexually frustrated, religious nutjob, that's his problem.
Dixie,
Of course he's mentally ill. Who else but a mentally ill person would take a corpse home and sleep with it?
First, thanks for the "totem pole" comment, that gave me a laugh. Most of us men can't bring a peace pipe to the party. Second, when you compare Santorum to the rest of the GOP field, he fits in pretty well. Part of me wonders if the complete nut-jobbery of the GOP candidates is an effort to make Mittens look electable by some cabal of GOP overlords? Hmm, don't think it's working.
He's just like every other gay-bashing Republican: he's closeted, repressed, and he's trying to take out his self-loathing on every other person rather than admit to himself that he's *gasp* gay, himself.
I predict he'll go down (pun intended) in flames when he either gets found pounding one out with another guy in bike-leathers, or some poor kid comes forward and claims to have been molested by him. In church.
T
But in the meantime he and his ilk drive the GOP further down the nutpath to theocracy. Even the guys they have that seem to have some tenuous grip on secular sanity - Huntsman comes to mind - have to genuflect to the Cross to get into the GOP game.
I don't see any of these gomers actually GOVERNING as some sort of theocrat. But they're raising expectations among the god-pesterers that are going to get harder and harder to deflect. The Holy Ghost of Theocracy is a hard spirit to shove back into its churchy bottle once its released.
I particularly like the bit about Santorum where he discusses how he and his wife "lost" a pre-term baby and brought the wee corpse home to show the children. Right, Rick; your wife had an endangering pregnancy....and at 20 weeks had labor induced to end it, in other words, a second trimeter abortion to save her life.
You know, the kind Rick thinks that nobody should have a right to get....
pRick Factotum is only popular with diehard social conservatives; the more rational GOPS know Romney will be the candidate and might also know that Willard asked the Mormon head for permission to run. Factotum will not poll well in New Hampshire, where jobs are more of a concern, these Iowa farmers growing filthy rich off ag subsidies and a lucrative ethanol market, not to mention a corn famine in China. All Factotum could do as a presidential candidate is drive the Democratic Mafia in California to set up a SuperPAC to rival Romney's. Then we will see who wins.
Labrys: having lost a kiddo at birth I'm not ready to kick the man for whatever he did afterwards; you do what you need to to stay sane in that situation.
I WILL kick his ass from here to the halls of Montezuma for not then taking that experience and learning to STFU about other people and THEIR child-decisions.
The choice to continue - or end - a pregnancy - is something that belongs to the people with the kid. Other people, and governments, need to butt the hell out other than to offer whatever support and/or grief the couple needs.
The fact that Santorum uses his child's death as an excuses to nanny OTHER people about theirs? Inexcusable. What an enormous d-bag.
Here's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
This woman got up at one of his "town halls" and asked about his insistence that the ACA is wrong in refusing insurers the "right" to fuck you over for "preexisting conditions". Y'see, her kiddo had cancer - CANCER - at five, and she knows that this poor little SOB is gonna get raped by every health insurer for the rest of his life, and so what did Santorum think about that.
Jolly old St. Rick replies; "Insurance works when people who are higher risk end up having to pay more, as they should. In your case, your son obviously did nothing wrong. Obviously there are a lot of other people that increased their health risk that did do things wrong and as a result, it resulted in higher health care costs."
THAT's the corporate ho' I'd gleefully kick all around the CONEX. Talk about a compassionless shitbag...
Stunning, really, that such a person could be considered for public office.
Now, he'd be perfect in a mega-church helping run the un-GAYING programs with someone like Mr. Haggard. But stunning that anyone would consider him a viable presidential candidate.
It's people like him and Ron Paul (the subject of the following post), Lisa, that give me the most hopeless feeling about the possibility of our pulling out of what looks increasingly to me like a political death-spiral.
Oh, it's slim-pickin's for sure this time. I was just discussing w/ Jim today when the last time was we had actual candidates with actual platforms that actually opposed each other.
I genuinely wish my hapless Political Science grad friend (who asked me for polical direction!) had someone to believe in; alas, there is none.
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