The Rick Santorum Post

I’m originally from Boston. It says so on the little profile to the right, and I’ve mentioned it a few times. I’m proud of that. I love the Red Sox, I love the culture, and I want to live there when I have a family. A friend of mine from school, also from Boston, just sent me an IM, saying I should write something about Rick Santorum and the comments he made about Boston. I hadn’t heard anything, so I checked Boston.com.

I did not believe what I was reading.

In comments he posted on a Catholic website- no, dammit, I’m not even going to paraphrase this shit. I’ll let him speak for himself. He was talking about innocent kids being sexually molested by priests.

“It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”

That’s right, you actually just read that.

According to this man, priests in Boston molested, abused and traumatized innocent little boys because they were living in a city of liberals. The people of the state of Pennsylvania elected this man a United States Senator. The same guy, entrusted with the responsibility of confirming Supreme Court justices, who also compared homosexuality to “man on dog” sex.

He wrote this crap in 2002, to be fair, and bloggers only dug it up a few weeks ago. But it is, appropriately, causing a firestorm. The mayor of Boston openly groaned when a Globe columnist asked him about it, and even the Republican governor of Massachusetts (whose coreligionists, about 150 years ago, were calling polygamy a “new and everlasting covenant,”) said Santorum had proven he knew nothing about the culture in New England.

I’ve had an extremely difficult time writing this because I’m so angry, and I don’t do my best work when I want to wring someone’s neck. A friend works in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, and has emphasized to me the importance of defeating Rick Santorum. I knew he was vulnerable to Bob Casey, and that he represents a gathering storm of religious extremism in the Senate. But until today, I didn’t know just how truly insane Santorum- and his constituents- could be.

There is good news and bad news about this situation, and there is a whole pile of bad news compared to a puddle of good. The truly bad news is that Rick Santorum is not the only person who believes this. He did not proclaim this ignorant and evil garbage because he thought it would sound good against the walls of his private office, nor did he think he would be breaking new ground by claiming that liberalism bred pedophilia. No. Rick Santorum, and his conservative constituents from every religious stripe, believe that unwed priests raping little children are in the same moral category as monogamous gay couples who love each other.

If you want more evidence of conservative opinion leaders espousing learned and intelligent opinions on sexual deviance, look no further than radio commentator Michael Savage, host of “The Savage Nation.” Five days after the December 16th, 2004 tsunami, he got on the radio with some words to guide us through a global time of tragedy.

"If you are a God-believing, God-fearing person, I am sure at some point you ask yourself, wait a minute: the epicenter of [the tsunami] was adjacent to the sex-trade island of Phuket, Thailand... We shouldn't be spending a nickel on this, as far as I'm concerned."

You heard about it here. (Thank MediaMatters.org on that one, by the way. This was the same guy who said women’s hormones were “out of control” and they shouldn’t have the right to vote.) The reason the tsunami struck Thailand and Indonesia was because of the sex trade. Oh, I’m not defending the sex trade here. I’m just saying that if you believe the tsunami swamped Phuket because of little boys having sex with American tourists, it’s safe to say that you’d believe priests could be coerced into having sex with little boys because their neighbors voted Kerry.

That is the bad news. A lot of people have the same view of liberals as Rick Santorum, or worse. The good news is that this jackass has managed to polarize a lot of people. Rational religious voters have been forced into doing a double-take at the guy they elected, and his reactionary rhetoric has given the Pennsylvania Democratic establishment an exceptionally good cause to rally around. I’ve always thought that Democrats should be running for something, and not against someone, but Rick Santorum is a great reason to bend that rule.

And it would have been one thing if he’d taken a swipe at liberals in, say, Alabama. There would be about 10 people there who were getting real worked up. But when you go after one of the strongest bases of liberal power, and the school-year home of thousands upon thousands of college students just itching to volunteer for your opponent’s campaign, you have, pardon the term, drawn a bullseye upon your ass. I’d love to see the federal funding report for Bob Casey’s campaign PAC next week. There are going to be a lot of new zeroes there, most with a return address of Boston, MA.

A note to the approximately 1.2 conservatives who read this blog. The biggest complaint of the American right, the motivation behind much of the vitriol coming from Fox News, talk radio and the White House, is that liberals are sanctimonious and convinced of their own intellectual superiority. A common right-wing tactic has been to combat this by claiming a moral superiority, through either religion or patriotism. If you think that you can get away with claiming moral superiority and then attacking liberalism as promoting pedophilia, you are going to learn your lesson at the rapidly-approaching moment when the Congressional aisles turn a refreshing shade of blue.

My recommendation to the Republicans, which I hope (for our sake) they do not follow, is that they cut Rick Santorum off and leave him to the political wolves in November 2006. He’s already trailing 50-39% in early Pennsylvania polls. However, if they don’t, I look forward, along with the rest of blue America, to choking this guy with his own well-chosen words.

I hope we get the privilege of using Rick Santorum as a brick to tie to the Republican Party's submerging feet. And when he’s unemployed next fall, I hope he takes a vacation to Bay State, so we can show him a real Boston welcome.