Yes, these are strong words from a generally mild goddess, but this man is truly evil. His new book It Takes A Family is coming out today, and according to the advertisement:
It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good is the first book by Rick Santorum. Throughout, Senator Santorum emphasizes that it is the family and not the federal government that must be at the center of an ordered and just society. To advance the Common Good, public policy must act in accordance with this truth. It Takes a Family will reinforce Senator Santorum's role as the leader of reform minded conservatives in America.
Note the part about "an ordered and just society". Santorum has a Confucian idea of the state, with the family seen as a microcosm of the state, and with the need to have strict hierarchies within both. Weird, this, considering that he is a Catholic, but then Santorum is a very weird man. I am going to show you just how weird he is by looking at three themes Santorum advocates: his urging that women return home from the labor force, his condemnation of the "hostile cultural climate" (caused by us liberals, he believes) which encourages adultery and sexually transmitted diseases, and his belief that religion and public life should be more intertwined.
1. Traditional Families For Everybody
Santorum doesn't just advocate for families, he advocates for a specific type of family and against all other types of families. The one he likes has a husband who goes out to work and a wife who stays at home, and equality of the two doesn't exactly enter Santorum's thinking:
"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 writes.
Right. Yet he himself can't support his family on an annual salary of $162,100 without occasional checks from his retired parents:
Rick and Karen Santorum, a former nurse and a nonpracticing attorney, have six children between the ages of 2 and 14, and live in Leesburg, Va., about an hour from Washington and as close to Washington as they could afford a home big enough for their family. (Karen Santorum would not be interviewed for this article.) Santorum drives himself to and from Capitol Hill in a 2001 Chevy TrailBlazer. He will not work Sundays, except in extraordinary circumstances, and he rarely stays overnight when traveling because he does not like to be away from his family. He tends a large vegetable garden and several fruit trees, cuts his own grass and does home repairs. Santorum says he does not want his home-state voters to think he feels impoverished on his $162,100 Senate salary, but it is clear that money is a concern and that he is almost certainly one of the least well-off among the 100 senators.
''We live paycheck to paycheck, absolutely,'' he says. Does he have money set aside for college? ''No. None. I always tell my kids: 'Work hard. We'll take out loans. Whatever.' '' He volunteers that his parents help out financially. ''They're by no means wealthy -- they're two retired V. A. employees -- but they'll send a check every now and then. They realize things are a little tighter for us.''
Interesting, isn't it? He is accepting handouts from his parents who are not wealthy and who get their money from the retirement system that Santorum is working to destroy. If Santorum cannot quite make it on a salary that most of us would find princely, what does he expect ordinary families to do?
What he expects women to do is to return home, at least if they have children. He also likes the idea of home-schooling (all his children are home-schooled), especially if he can charge someone else for the teaching materials. His idea of the traditional family seems to be one where the mother will be fully employed in doing everything for nothing while the rest of the society gets a free ride.
And why aren't women eagerly obeying Santorum's stern advice? There is the money thing, of course, as families have to eat, but it's not exactly attractive for women to be told that working outside the home and enjoying it makes a mother morally deficient.
What about same-sex marriages? Wouldn't it make sense to let gays and lesbians marry so that there would be less of all that rutting about Santorum so strongly disapproves of? Here is his answer:
When I asked him if he viewed gay marriage as a threat to his own marriage, he answered quickly. ''Yes, absolutely,'' he said. ''It threatens my marriage. It threatens all marriages. It threatens the traditional values of this country.''
2. Sodom and Gomorrh
Santorum believes that the society is crumbling because of a "hostile social culture", pornography and extramarital affairs. Santorum has decided that all this is caused by us liberals and progressives. Not business interests or all those wingnuts I see in the news when they get caught for something really nasty, like sex with minors. Nope, it's progressives and liberals who advocate these vices. Of course he also fails to point out that mistresses and brothels have been around a very long time indeed.
What he sees everywhere today is something he calls "no-fault freedom":
One example of the consequences of no-fault freedom, he says, is how sexual freedom has resulted in "the debasement of women, mental illness, and an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, causing infertility cancer, even death."
He also rails against the "hostile cultural climate" -- influenced by the moral values shown on television shows such as "Friends" and "Sex in the City" to violent video games -- where parents must raise their kids, and praises companies such as Wal-Mart for refusing to sell some music CD's with offensive language.
The debasement of women. Mmm. I have heard that before from antifeminists. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea of women's dignity. Women's dignity is preserved only when they are safely subjected to men and the church. Some might think that deserves the title of debasement, too, but not Santorum. What is hidden from the public eye seems to be acceptable, and sometimes even public immoral acts are acceptable. If it's a wingnut who commits them:
FOR A GUY who just wrote a stinging book about family values, Sen. Rick Santorum sure sounded mealy-mouthed when asked about U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood's dalliances.
"I don't know how it's going to shake out," Santorum said Monday during an appearance at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Plains Township. "All I would suggest is that, again, until we know all the facts and we look at the job that Congressman Sherwood is doing and make decisions based on the facts and the work he's doing."
Santorum dodged a reporter's question about whether the allegations against Sherwood have hurt the Republican Party.
"I think what hurts and helps the Republican Party is what we're doing in serving the American people," he said, shifting the focus to the media, which he said likes to focus on racy and scandalous stories.
...
Sherwood, 64, has admitted to some sort of relationship with 29-year-old Cynthia Ore and apologized, more or less, to his wife and three daughters. Three days after a Times Leader story ran on April 30 about a 911 call Ore made to police saying Sherwood started to choke her, Sherwood issued a statement saying he's sorry for causing his family and supporters "pain and embarrassment."
Santorum is a two-faced fuckwit. In any sany society we wouldn't even know about this guy. In this one, he is harboring ambitions to run for the president of the United States.
I'm not going to even mention Santorum's arguments that it was the "no-holds freedom" in liberal Boston that caused the pederasty scandal in the Catholic church. Oops, I just did.
3. Religion
Santorum is a very religious man:
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.''
How does he interact with it, then? If he is going to enforce his religion on all of us, we have the right to know where he gets his religious ideas from. Is it from the priests in the Catholic church? And if he hasn't read the Bible cover to cover (I have, and I'm a pagan goddess), how can he be so certain that his interpretations are the correct ones?
I guess it doesn't matter. People who are fanatically single-minded never see any complexity anywhere, never doubt their own personal telephone line to some divinity. Such people scare me.