[Vision2020] Rick’s Religious Fanaticism

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 21, 2012
Rick’s Religious Fanaticism By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

WASHINGTON

Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.

That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah.

“Satan has his sights on the United States of America,” the conservative
presidential candidate warned in 2008. “Satan is attacking the great
institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and
sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so
deeply rooted in the American tradition.”

When, in heaven’s name, did sensuality become a vice? Next he’ll be banning
Barry White.

Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as
he called it four years ago. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you
would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent,
powerful, influential country — the United States of America,” he told
students at Ave Maria University in Florida. He added that mainline
Protestantism in this country “is in shambles. It is gone from the world of
Christianity as I see it.”

Satan strikes, a Catholic exorcist told me, when there are “soul wounds.”
Santorum, who is considered “too Catholic” even by my über-Catholic
brothers, clearly believes that America’s soul wounds include men and women
having sex for reasons other than procreation, people involved in same-sex
relationships, women using contraception or having prenatal testing,
environmentalists who elevate “the Earth above man,” women working outside
the home, “anachronistic” public schools, Mormonism (which he said is
considered “a dangerous cult” by some Christians), and President Obama
(whom he obliquely and oddly compared to Hitler and accused of having “some
phony theology”).

Santorum didn’t go as far as evangelist Franklin Graham, who heinously
doubted the president’s Christianity on “Morning Joe.”

Mullah Rick, who has turned prayer into a career move, told ABC News’s Jake
Tapper that he disagreed with the 1965 Supreme Court decision striking down
a ban on contraception. And, in October, he insisted that contraception is
“not O.K. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to
how things are supposed to be.”

Senator Sanitarium, as he was once dubbed on “The Sopranos,” sometimes
tries to temper his retrogressive sermons so as not to drive away
independent and Republican women who like to work, see their kids taught by
professionals and wear Victoria’s Secret.

He told The Washington Post on Friday that, while he doesn’t want to fund
contraception through Planned Parenthood, he wouldn’t ban it: “The idea
that I’m coming after your birth control is absurd. I was making a
statement about my moral beliefs, but I won’t impose them on anyone else in
this case.”

That doesn’t comfort me much. I’ve spent a career watching candidates deny
they would do things that they went on to do as president, and watching
presidents let their personal beliefs, desires and insecurities shape
policy decisions.

Mullah Rick is casting doubt on issues of women’s health and safety that
were settled a long time ago. We’re supposed to believe that if he got more
power he’d drop his crusade?

The Huffington Post reports that Santorum told Philadelphia Magazine in
1995 that he “was basically pro-choice all my life, until I ran for
Congress.” Then, he said, he read the “scientific literature.”

He seems to have decided that electoral gold lies in the ruthless
exploitation of social and cultural wedge issues. Unlike the Bushes, he has
no middle man to pander to prejudices; he turns the knife himself.

Why is it that Republicans don’t want government involved when it comes to
the economy (opposing the auto bailouts) but do want government involved
when it comes to telling people how to live their lives?

In a party always misty for bygone times bristling with ugly inequities,
Santorum is successful because he’s not ashamed to admit that he wants to
take the country backward.

Virginia’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, touted as a vice
presidential prospect, also wants to drag women back into a cave.

This week, public outrage forced the Virginia Legislature to pause on its
way to passing a creepy bill forcing women seeking an abortion to undergo
an ultrasound, which, for early procedures, would require a wand being
inserted into the vagina — an invasion that anti-abortion groups hope would
shame some women into changing their minds once they saw or heard about
traits of the fetus.

Democratic Delegate Lionell Spruill hotly argued that the bill would force
“legal rape.” “I cannot believe that you would disrespect women and mothers
in such a way,” he chided colleagues. “This legislation is simply
mean-spirited, and it is bullying, bullying women simply because you can.”

While the Democratic-controlled Maryland House of Delegates just passed a
bill that would allow same-sex marriage, the Republican-controlled Virginia
Legislature passed a bill allowing private adoption agencies to
discriminate against gays who want to be parents.

The Potomac River dividing those states seems to be getting wider by the
day.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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