GOP Rick Santorum is a danger to society

Rick Santorum (REUTERS/Joshua Lott)

The 2012 presidential election is over, although this might come as news to many. It was forfeited again this week, as it has been for weeks now, by an increasingly foolhardy right wing overreach that has spooked the less conservative center.

Relentless opposition to every item on the Obama administration’s agenda hasn't reaped major electoral dividends for the GOP, but it has exhausted us all.

Put simply, thanks to all the endless stonewalling, the choice that has emerged this cycle is between Yes We Can and No You Can't.

Over the past seven days the GOP have told us that no, we can't raise taxes on the rich, no, we can't have a middle class tax cut, no, we can't have employment extensions, no, we can't have an equal pay act, no, we can't have contraceptive care, no, we can't permit women soldiers, no, we can't marry the person we want to build our lives with, no, we can't have mandatory health care -- no no no.

But what you're actually witnessing is a party whose defunct ideologies no longer have relevance or saleable ideas of their own. No is not a policy.

I come from a society that for decades said no to every political initiative it was offered. Intransigence in the face of unstoppable change, Northern Ireland prolonged its own suffering and retarded political progress by reflexively refusing to give an inch to its political adversaries, with fateful consequences for the nation, north and south.

I see more than a little of that brand of intransigence at work here in the U.S. now. I also hear the religious justification for political opposition that used to stymie any kind of progress before it even started.

I can’t tell you how depressing it is to hear America’s political leaders sound like Unionists in the 1980s.

Just this week Rick Santorum claimed he opposed the president on theological grounds, making explicit what no other conservative presidential candidate has ever dared to. Obama’s agenda is “not about you,” Santorum said.
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“It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible.”

Santorum actually believes he has God and the Bible on his side. It’s not just a stump speech that he’s giving.

The Tea Party base have responded to that sincerity and put him 15% ahead of Mitt Romney nationally in the GOP presidential race. Santorum actually believes Obama is attending to someone other than God. I’ll give you three guesses what that means.

Aside from Santorum’s lazy intellectual arrogance, which is monumental, what his speech did was unmask him for the religious fanatic he obviously is.

Santorum believes that women should not work, he believes women should not serve in our armed forces, he believes that gay people can be “cured,” he believes that health care is a luxury not a right.

Santorum also opposes all firms of birth control -- all of it. If you’re a woman he wants you pregnant and back in the kitchen where you actually belong, because to live any other way is just a plot by radical feminists.

“In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to,” Santorum said.

“What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else -- or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon -- find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.”

To Santorum, the reality that 98% of Catholic women in the U.S. have used contraception is a sinister feminist plot. Santorum wants you to live in the same world your great grandmother’s did instead.

It’s important in life to be able to recognize a fanatic when you’re looking at one. Santorum, despite his folksy turns of phrase and his sweater vests, is a religious fanatic.

So how bad can all of this get? During a speech in Georgia on Sunday, Santorum actually compared the 2012 election to America’s all too gradual response to the growing Nazi menace during the late 1930s.

He actually urged his church audience (yes, he was speaking in a church) to not sit quietly while “Europe was under darkness.”

Building on this blatantly stupid Obama as Hitler idea Santorum added, “We thought, well, you know, it’ll get better. Yeah, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This will be okay.

“I mean, yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy after a while. After a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe who’s not so good of a guy after all, but ya know what, why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems,” he said.

Santorum doesn’t think he’s fighting an election, he thinks he’s fighting World War II. Beware this man.