Let's Attack Rick Santorum
People keep talking to me as if my review of the Rick Santorum profile was supposed to be positive. I feel like I deflated pretty much the whole rationale of his brand of politics, but if it wasn't clear enough, let's go back to the record.
We'll start off with an example of Republican hypocrisy in using legal justifications for clearly social-engineering causes:
In a much-publicized interview in 2003, he argued that the Supreme Court should not overturn state sodomy laws that ban homosexual sex and suggested that such a ruling would create a justification for bigamy, polygamy and incest. At one point, he even raised the specter of bestiality, using the phrase ''man on dog.''
I certainly remember this interview; the reporter's response was, "I'm sorry, I didn't expect to be talking about man on dog with a United States Senator." (The reporter, as it happens, was also married to John Kerry's then-campaign manager. Intrigue abounds.) Now, look, Santorum uses the slippery-slope argument here, but it ruins his case. If we decide that homosexual intercourse is acceptable and legal, he reasons, where do we stop? What kind of sexual behavior is unacceptable? Why is that the marker? Honestly, I don't have answers. Maybe I will in law school. But even now I can see that if the distinction is arbitrary, then that means there's equally no reason to draw the line at heterosexual intercourse and nothing else. Essentially, Santorum uses the same tired social-conservative argument: we should do things this way because that's the way we've always done it. You can dress it up in judicial robes, but it still ain't gonna make sense. Fortunately, Santorum is an authority on more than just the law:
In 2002, in a little-noticed interview that took place in Rome, Santorum told National Catholic Reporter, a U.S.-based weekly, that he considered George W. Bush, a Methodist, to be ''the first Catholic president of the United States.'' (His remark was reminiscent of the novelist Toni Morrison's saying that Bill Clinton was the nation's first black president, although an obvious difference is that there actually has been a Catholic president.)
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And what about John F. Kennedy? Santorum says he believes that in a political sense, Kennedy shed his Catholicism. (Kennedy's most famous statement on church and state was: ''I do not speak for my church on public matters -- and the church does not speak for me.'')
This, I think, indicates the social conservative mindset: he is the authority. Seriously, who the fuck is Rick Santorum to say that Kennedy wasn't a real Catholic? Two points to mention here. One, you could make a pretty strong case that John Kennedy actually wasn't a real Catholic, with two words: Marilyn Monroe. Santorum, on the other hand, chooses not to focus on Kennedy's assault on his marriage (which, see my earlier post, must mean Santorum's own marriage suffers as a result), instead attacking Kennedy for adhering to the separation of church and state, which I think reveals a lot about where Santorum's priorities lie. Second point: let's not forget, the Catholic Church to which both men belong does have an authority on who's a real Catholic. Did the pope excommunicate Kennedy or otherwise declare him un-Catholic? Of course not, but Rick Santorum seems to disagree pretty strongly here with his infallible leader. Some Catholic! It gets better:
He would go a step further in loosening the reins on charities by letting them read from Bibles and speak of their faith. He said he did not see the difference between a Bible and ''the teachings of Aristotle -- that's a philosophy of life.'' He added: ''Here you have a book that's been pretty well tested over time. So to say, here are some passages from the Bible that may help you, I don't necessarily see that as a negative.''
Are there sects of Aristotelians wandering the earth proclaiming that Aristotle died for our sins? The difference is that Aristotle claims to be a worldview, and the Bible claims to be the worldview. And when you let an organization tell you their worldview is correct to the exclusion of all others, you open the door to letting them limit their services, federally funded mind you, to those who decline to accept their worldview. Does Santorum really not see this?
Fortunately, in the end Santorum shows what got his ideas about faith so fucked up:
Santorum is not a reader of Scripture -- ''I've never read the Bible cover to cover; maybe I should have'' -- and has no passages he clings to when seeking spiritual guidance. ''I'm a Catholic, so I'm not a biblical scholar. I'm not someone who has verses he can pop out. That's not how I interact with the faith.''He reads magazines and journals offering commentary on religion, among them First Things, which is edited by the theologian Richard John Neuhaus, a former Lutheran minister and a convert to Catholicism.
All right, you've got two texts here. Your faith calls one of them the absolute word of God. The other one is a magazine. Which one do you study?