Rick Santorum: the flavor of the week

(Think Progress)

Now that Rick Santorum is the flavor-of-the-week in the Republican Party, people are starting to care what he thinks.

So the news media will finally start looking at his record, and listening to what he says, which is pretty much what torpedoed all the others before him - Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul. What do you think they'll find?

Well, I'd say that this 2005 interview at NPR might be a good place to start:

Republican Rick Santorum has chosen this moment to publish a book, attacking what he calls the bigs: big government, big media, big entertainment, big universities. The book is called "It Takes a Family," which plays off Hillary Clinton's book title, "It Takes a Village." Santorum says he's critiquing the ideology of the left, and he also questions some conservatives.

Senator RICK SANTORUM ("It Takes a Family"): They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. Government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulation low and that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world, and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can't go it alone, that there is no such society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

Note that Santorum is against this idea that "government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulation low and that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom." He's against "this idea that people should be left alone."

Funny, isn't it? Rick Santorum is the exact opposite of Ron Paul. They're both batshit crazy, both as extreme as they come, but they come at it from completely opposite perspectives. It's really something, isn't it? Only in America could these two people be in the same political party!

I should probably admit that Santorum is right, in a way, about past societies. The idea that people should be able to decide for themselves was radical when America was founded. We were going to let individuals decide for themselves what God they worshiped and how they worshiped him? The government was going to stay out of it? No way! That couldn't work!

Even the idea of democracy wasn't this shocking to conservatives. Sure, let the majority decide, but you had to have an official religion. You couldn't just let individuals make up their own minds about something this important! Who ever heard of a society with diverse religious beliefs?

(Indeed, even Ron Paul doesn't go that far. He just favors states' rights. He doesn't want the federal government forcing these things on people. He wants the states to do it.)

There's more here:

INSKEEP: You mentioned earlier a list of what you call bigs, opponents in a sense of what you stand for: big government, big labor. I want to ask about one item on the...

Sen. SANTORUM: Big business.

INSKEEP: That's the one I want to ask about. Why big business?

Sen. SANTORUM: You know, one of the things that I realize is that if you look at big business, I mean, they--and what they fund and what they do, they don't really--they don't fund the small non-profit community-based organizations that really are out there on the front lines helping people. They fund the big philanthropies. They're safe. But they're also, by and large, not family-friendly, they're not faith-friendly. Candidly, I believe most corporations actually don't mind big government.

INSKEEP: In the most recent rating that I could find, the Chamber of Commerce rating of different senators, you voted with the Chamber of Commerce 94 percent of the time.

Sen. SANTORUM: Yeah. And I do vote with--on a pro-economic growth agenda, and that's pretty much what the Chamber of Commerce votes on. I'm talking about their behaviors with respect to the culture.

Rick Santorum voted with the big business-controlled Chamber of Commerce 94% of the time. When it comes to tax cuts for the rich, he's with them all the way. (And note how that "pro-economic growth agenda" actually worked out for us!) But he's wary of big business "with respect to the culture."

That's because big corporations tend to be liberal in granting equal rights to gays. Big corporations tend to be friendly to domestic partnerships. Their insurance and retirement plans, such as they are, often don't discriminate against homosexuals. And  Rick Santorum is positively obsessed with gay people.

Do you think it's just coincidence that "Santorum" is not a word you want to Google? It's not, not at all. None of the Republican candidates are tolerant of gays, but Rick Santorum is obsessed with them. For him, the "culture war" is everything.

Even as a Republican, even while voting with the Chamber of Commerce 94% of the time, he still has reservations against big business because they're not "faith-friendly" (i.e. they don't discriminate against gay people as badly as Santorum thinks they should).

Now, the Christian evangelicals in the Republican base will certainly eat this up, but I wonder what the GOP's corporate backers think about it. This has always been an uneasy alliance. By and large, the rich go along with the culture war lunatics, as long as they get tax cuts and deregulation themselves. But they want to control politicians, not the other way around.

And the religious nuts will go along with tax cuts for the rich, but only as long as the rich look the other way on the crazy culture war stuff. But given a chance, they'd crack down hard on corporations - not for pollution, not for corporate fraud, not for corruption, but for sexual innuendo on television, racy movies, and gay-friendly personnel policies.

Santorum goes into that in more detail during the interview. Read it yourself, if you wish. But I want to turn to something else now:

INSKEEP: I want to ask about a couple of other items here. President Bush in the last several days has said that he believes intelligent design, the idea that there is a creator behind the work of the world that we see, that intelligent design should be taught in schools. What do you think of that?

Sen. SANTORUM: I think I would probably tailor that a little more than what the president has suggested, that I'm not comfortable with intelligent design being taught in the science classroom. What we should be teaching are the problems and holes and I think there are legitimate problems and holes in the theory of evolution. And what we need to do is to present those fairly from a scientific point of view. And we should lay out areas in which the evidence supports evolution and the areas in the evidence that does not.

INSKEEP: Why do what you see as holes in the theory of evolution, and there are scientists who will hear on our air that will disagree with the idea that there really are that many holes...

Sen. SANTORUM: Sure.

INSKEEP: ...but...

Sen. SANTORUM: I just think they're wrong.

INSKEEP: ...why does that particular item of the academic curriculum concern you as a United States senator?

Sen. SANTORUM: It has huge...

INSKEEP: Why would those holes matter to you?

Sen. SANTORUM: ...consequences for society and it's where we come from. Does man have a purpose? Is there a purpose for our lives? Or are we just simply, you know, the result of chance. If we're the result of chance, if we're simply a mistake of nature, then that puts a different moral demand on us. In fact, it doesn't put a moral demand on us that if, in fact, we are a creation of a being that has moral demands.

I'm sure that Santorum's supporters would agree with all of this, but for rational people, there are some clear problems here.

First, Rick Santorum says he doesn't think that "intelligent design" should be taught in science class, because it can't be taught in science class, not in American public schools, anyway. The courts have already ruled on that, because the evidence is clear that "intelligent design" is just a new name for "creationism." It's a religious belief, not science. That's been well-documented in federal court.

Santorum knows that, so he's taking the fallback position of Christian fundamentalists, that public schools should teach the "holes" in the theory of evolution, the evidence that supports evolution and the evidence against it. But biologists say that there aren't any holes. There are things we don't know, of course. There are always things we don't know. (Otherwise, what would be the point of scientific research?) But there just isn't any credible evidence against evolution.

Rick Santorum says he thinks they're wrong. But who is Rick Santorum? He's a politician, not a biologist. What does he know that biologists don't know about their own field of expertise? Science is based on evidence, so if Santorum had some evidence, he'd present it (or, more likely, other scientists would). But no, he just doesn't "believe" what the evidence tells scientists.

[Let me just note, too, the ridiculous idea that the "holes" in a scientific theory should be taught in low-level science classes. Do we teach the "holes" in the theory of gravity and let students make up their own minds? Do we teach the "holes" in quantum mechanics and let students decide for themselves what they want to believe?  Do we teach them the stork theory as an alternate explanation to where babies come from, and let them decide for themselves which one is true?

[No. In low-level science classes, we teach the scientific consensus. If there are "holes" - and as I say, there are always things we don't know - those things are discussed in college, in graduate courses, where students have the background to understand the issues.]

Anyway, Santorum goes on to explain why he doesn't believe the science. If evolution is true, then God didn't create us for a purpose and... oh, my God, he might be tempted to start fucking men!  OK, he didn't put it exactly that way, but it's a pretty close paraphrase, I think. :)

One more excerpt:

INSKEEP: In your book, you give that list of bigs, groups that you think have too much power. You also have a list of littles--the family. You also name the church as an organization that seems to be under too much pressure today. Isn't your public career an example of the fact that the church has profound influence in the United States and that religion has profound influence in the United States in its accorded respect? You're in the United States Senate. You're the third-ranking senator and you're by no means the highest-ranking Christian in the government.

Sen. SANTORUM: Well, no one's saying that people of faith have not been allowed in the public square. All I'm saying is that people of faith when they speak in the public square get hammered for speaking that way in the public square. I'm always told that what I say is controversial. Why is it controversial? Because I speak from a tradition that has now fallen out of favor with the dominant media in this country. And so when I say things like marriage should be between one man and one woman, I'm called a bigot.

INSKEEP: You have become so much more powerful than your critics that I wonder how you can continue to feel oppressed. You're laughing.

Sen. SANTORUM: I'm not. No one's...

INSKEEP: You think that you are oppressed here.

Sen. SANTORUM: No, I'm not feeling oppressed at all. I feel very blessed to be in the position I'm in. All I'm suggesting is is that if you look at some of the things just that I have been called in recent days, you know, whacked out, nut case, weird, on drugs, sanctimonious, hypocritical, idiot, stupid--I mean, these are things...

INSKEEP: Are you reading from a list there?

Sen. SANTORUM: I'm reading from a list of what...

INSKEEP: What--on your personal data thing.

Sen. SANTORUM: Right, on my BlackBerry, of things just in the last week I've been called for saying some of these, quote, "controversial things"...

Right. Believers are persecuted in America because Rick Santorum gets criticized for what he says. People call Santorum, a politician, bad names. Fancy that! Well then, that's clearly proof that Christianity is a poor little underdog in America, isn't it?

Is it any wonder that Rick Santorum wants to be president? Because no one would dare call the president bad names, would they? Obviously, the President of the United States is above criticism. Certainly, no one ever says anything bad about Barack Obama, right?

And poor little Rick keeps on his BlackBerry a list of the bad things people call him! Heh, heh. God, I hope he doesn't read this blog post! Hmm,... I wonder if he keeps pictures of naked men on there, too, just to remind him of what he's fighting against? He probably gets a lot of inspiration from that, don't you think?