| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Rick Santorum on Gays & Bla People | ||||
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I blogged about this before - I mean, when Rick Santorum said, or certainly seemed to say, "I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money." (I mentioned the homophobia then, too, as well as here.)
Now, Santorum claims that he didn't say "black." He says he meant to say some other, unspecified word, but changed his mind and garbled it, so that it just sounded like "black." OK, maybe. But two things come to mind when I watch the video clip of his speech.
The first is that there's no hesitation when he says the word. Normally, when you garble a word, when you start to say something and then change your mind, there's a pause, a hesitation, a momentary break in your sentence. But I don't see anything like that here, do you?
It's true that the last consonant sounds a little weird, maybe a slight accent, maybe a bit of phlegm. But the "bla" part certainly seems plain enough. And that brings me to my second point, one that Stephen Colbert makes, quite humorously, in this video clip. If Santorum didn't say "black," he certainly meant to say it, before - possibly - changing his mind at the very last second.
If he wasn't deliberately saying - for political effect in the overwhelmingly white GOP base - that black people just get handouts from the government, from white people's tax money, then he must just assume that, himself. It must be his own automatic assumption, then.
So is this just a Freudian slip, where Santorum accidentally said something he really thinks, instead of what's "politically correct." Or was it actually a deliberately racist statement?
And either way, does it make much difference? Not that I can see.
The homophobia, well, that speaks for itself, doesn't it? "Even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children's lives." Yeah, even fathers who beat their children, who rape their children, are a good thing, huh? Because that's what God wants.
When I was in grade school, in my small Nebraska town, the father of one of my classmates would regularly get drunk and beat his wife and kids. Back then, that was just a thing everyone deplored, but did nothing about.
The kids in that family were little sociopaths themselves, as I remember from those childhood years. Much later, I heard that my classmate was in the state penitentiary, having been convicted of some violent felony (admittedly, I don't remember the details, if I ever heard them - it could have been just third-hand gossip).
But let's hope that he had kids first, huh? And that maybe he got to beat them around a little bit before the big, bad government locked him away? After all, kids need a father.
Kids need parents. Two is better than one, no doubt, but only if they're both good parents. That's saying nothing against the millions of single parents raising kids. I just suspect that parenthood is difficult enough that, ideally, two people sharing the duty might lessen the burden a bit (at least the financial burden, which is considerable).
But there are a lot of things that go into that, and in many cases single parenthood is preferable. In many more cases, it's just necessary. Being a single parent is difficult, but most single parents work hard to do it well.
Heck, it's tough enough even for a couple, I know. And all the studies I've seen indicate that children raised by homosexual couples - or biracial couples, for that matter - are just as happy and well-adjusted as those raised by white, heterosexual couples. OK, maybe they tend to be less racist and homophobic, if that's a problem for you.
Evidence, of course, means nothing to the faith-based. But how about this? It's none of your business! Yes, we all have a duty to see that children aren't abused, either physically or mentally. We all have a duty to see that children get a good education, that they get enough to eat, that they have a secure place to live.
But if your idea of what God wants is different from someone else's idea - whether or not they even believe in a god - that's none of your business. If two adults want to get married, that's none of your business. It's their business.
I don't want to return to the days when a drunk could freely beat his wife and children because it was no one else's business. But that doesn't mean I want the government in the bedroom, either, or local busybodies in charge of every detail of a person's life. There is a happy medium, you know.
Republicans seem to be so eager to run everyone else's life for them. Gee, that's real generous, I'm sure. But considering David Vitter, Mark Foley, Newt Gingrich, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Bob Allen, Mark Sanford, Ed Schrock, Rush Limbaugh, and many, many more, maybe these people should worry more about running their own life.
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