Alex Henderson

 The Culture Wars

The Wrath of Rick Santorum, GOP Culture Warrior

By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, January 5, 2012

When Pennsylvania’s two-term Republican senator Rick Santorum was voted out of office during the November 2006 election, his defeat was celebrated by liberals and progressives as well by the libertarian part of the right. Santorum epitomized the theocratic view that had come to dominate the Republican Party, and those who believed in the separation of church and state were happy to see him go. His replacement, Sen. Bob Casey, Jr. (one of Pennsylvania’s most anti-abortion Democrats), is hardly the essence of social liberalism, but he’s generally a moderate compared to Santorum. Saddened by Santorum’s defeat, “family values” zealots consoled one another by saying, “Don’t worry, we haven’t heard the last of Rick Santorum. He’ll run for office again someday.” It turns out they were right.

In the Iowa Caucuses of early January 2012, Santorum lost to fellow GOP presidential primary candidate Mitt Romney by a mere eight votes—and that was despite spending less than $200,000 on advertising in that state (compared to the millions that Romney’s campaign spent on advertising in Iowa). Of course, Santorum’s success in Iowa doesn’t necessarily mean that he will be running against President Barack Obama in November; many political pundits and GOP strategists are still betting on Romney. But even so, the very thought of a Santorum presidency is troubling to anyone who doesn’t want to live in a theocracy.

Santorum hasn’t moderated his views since 2006. This is the same Rick Santorum who not only opposes abortion under any circumstances, but also, continues to oppose something that greatly reduces the number of abortions: contraception. In a recent interview with Jake Tapper of ABC News, Santorum reiterated his belief that states have a right to ban all forms of contraception if they choose. Santorum remains a staunch opponent of Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark 1965 Supreme Court decision that struck down a Connecticut law that prohibited contraception for married couples. Some opponents of abortion encourage the use of condoms, IUDs and birth control pills; to Santorum, contraception in general should be abolished along with Roe v. Wade.

      Santorum’s opposition to the Griswold v. Connecticut decision as well as the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas (which struck down a Texas sodomy law) stem from a firmly held belief that a right to privacy does not exist in the U.S. Constitution. And Santorum made his opposition to gay rights abundantly clear when, during an infamous 2003 interview, he equated homosexuality with bestiality, incest and pedophilia. In response to those remarks, sex columnist Dan Savage (one of Santorum’s most outspoken critics) launched a contest in which readers were invited to suggest definitions for the word “santorum”; the definition that Savage made famous was “the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.”

Savage wanted to get under Santorum’s skin, and he succeeded; the former senator and his far-right supporters have been indignant over the fact that Santorum’s name has been linked to anal sex. Much to Santorum’s dismay, the Dan Savage definition of “santorum” comes right up in a Google search.

To those who were offended by Santorum’s gay-bashing comments, the success of Savage’s anti-Santorum campaign was poetic justice. But to social conservatives and far-right theocrats, Santorum is a martyr—and in early January 2012, they were delighted to see their “martyr” showing his political resilience. In the Bizarro World that Santorum’s supporters inhabit, his success in Iowa was a blow against the “coastal elitists” and “secular humanists” who don’t appreciate good, down-home Christian “family values.”

Criticism of Santorum has often focused on his anti-gay statements. But Savage, who is openly gay, has often pointed out that the ex-senator’s religious extremism doesn’t begin and end with the gay community. As Savage recently told “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann on January 4, “Rick Santorum doesn’t have merely an anti-gay agenda—he has an anti-straight agenda too. He's against birth control, he's against abortion, he's against pornography, he's against all sorts of things that straight people use and enjoy frequently—almost once a week, at least. You need to know, heterosexual Americans, that gay-bashing isn't his only hobby. The straight-bashing is part and parcel of Rick Santorum too.”

Indeed, Santorum’s own words on bear out Savage’s assertion that he is no friend of fellow heterosexuals when it comes to sex. In October, he told Caffeinated Thoughts:  “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.” And Santorum added: “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. 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.”

Yet despite his anti-privacy, anti-gay, anti-contraception record, Santorum falls short of ideal for some extremists of the Christian Right. Santorum is Catholic, and many Protestant fundamentalists of the far right hate Catholics almost as much as they hate Muslims and mainline non-fundamentalist Protestants. But if Santorum did, by some chance, win the GOP presidential nomination over Romney and others, would their hatred of Catholics be eclipsed by their virulent hatred of President Barack Obama?

There was a time when being a religious extremist was not a litmus test for Republican candidates, but very little remains from the old Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party. Goldwater, in the 1980s and 1990s, was a vehement critic of the Christian Right, which he saw as antithetical to the spirit of true conservatism. Santorum, with his theocratic outlook, stands in sharp contrast to Goldwater’s live-and-let-live approach to social issues—and anyone who doesn’t want to live in a religious police state would not fare well under a Santorum presidency.

Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in AlterNet, The L.A. Weekly, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, The Pasadena Weekly and a long list of other publications.



Photo by Gage Skidmore