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Rick Santorum: American Ayatollah joins forces with Taliban-like Southern Baptist Convention
by Michael R. Burch,
an editor and publisher
of Holocaust and Nakba poetry
As I write this article on Leap Day, Tennessee conservatives are
leaping from their seats to cheer for Rick Santorum at Nashville's Belmont University,
which recently fired a soccer coach, Lisa Howe, when she came out of the closet. The majority of
Santorum’s most enthusiastic supporters are Bible-believing Protestants. But I wonder how many
happily-married-and-faithful Protestants understand that, according to Santorum, they are in league with the Devil,
homosexuals, prostitutes and adulterers because they have sex for intimacy and pleasure, rather than for purely
procreational purposes? Yes, Santorum really is that irrational, and due to what
seems to be some sort of exotic obsessive-compulsive disorder, he can’t stop
talking about sex, contraception and religion, even though doing so will surely
cost him any chance at the presidency. Why? Because American women will not
allow him to return them to the Dark Ages.
(I would like to note for the record that I am merely speaking from the
point of view of orthodox Protestantism and have no personal moral objections to
adults having consensual sex however they prefer. I prefer the golden rule of
Wicca: "An' it do no harm, do as thou wilt.")
Santorum is a cult of one in American politics. But the political figure he
most closely resembles is Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini: a rigid moralist with
prehistoric views about women and sex whose puritanical regime dismantled family
planning centers and ordered health care professionals not to advocate
contraception. Sound familiar?
Yes, Santorum really does want to ban contraceptives. He admitted this himself,
saying:
"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before,
is ... the dangers of contraception ... It's not okay. It's a license to do
things in a sexual realm that is [sic] counter to how things are supposed to
be." In other words, Americans should breed mindlessly like rabbits, leaving how
many babies they have to the whims of chance, or give up sex altogether. Why? Because
like the Ayatollah Khomeini, Rick Santorum knows the mind of God, intimately.
The contraception question is quite simple: do American women have the right
to decide if and when to become mothers? Right-wing chauvinists are increasingly
and stridently exclaiming “No!” as they attack women’s rights, contraception and Planned Parenthood
with typical alpha male bravado. For Protestant clerics like Richard Land and
Albert Mohler of the
Taliban-like Southern Baptist Convention to side with the Vatican is hypocritical, because
they would never say that the religious liberty of Mormons should result in
polygamy being legalized, or that pagans should be allowed to sacrifice children
to the “gods.” But all is fair in the hole-y war against Barack Obama and the fairer
sex. Now the GOP risks alienating the better half of its voters by
foolishly suggesting that chauvinistic men can legislate medieval “morality” at the expense
of women’s health and happiness.
The Republican party risks imploding over contraception and religion. Yes, the
Bible commands "Be fruitful and multiply." But in a plethora of verses it also
explicitly commands racism, slavery, sex slavery, infanticide, matricide, ethnic
cleansing and genocide. If we no longer take Yahweh's advice on other social
issues, why pretend that the nomadic goatherds who claimed to speak for him were
oracles of divine wisdom on matters of human sexuality and reproduction?
Rick Santorum stands firm on sex and contraception: these are matters for God,
speaking through the Roman Catholic Church, to dick-tate (please pardon the pun)
to the unwashed masses. Therefore, sex for purposes of intimacy and pleasure is
strictly verboten. Sieg heil, mein Führer!
Mitt Romney is more ambivalent, waffling between a sane perspective
(contraception is a matter of personal conscience)
and irrationality (only God has the right to decide whether loose collections of
stem cells are fully fledged human beings from the instant of conception, and
the Pope and Rick Santorum speak for him, despite the rather obvious problem
that they consider using condoms to be a "sin,"
meaning that they condemn millions of young people to contract diseases like
AIDS).
Incredibly, Rick Santorum also believes that our government has the right to
monitor what we do in bed. In an interview with the Associated Press, he opined
that the "right to privacy ... doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States
Constitution." Since he’s opposed to all forms of non-procreational sex, it
seems he
would prefer for the government to monitor married couples' sexual activities to make sure they aren’t defying the “will
of God” by “fooling around” when they’re not trying to make babies. Since he
wants a smaller, less intrusive federal government,
in his infinite wisdom he bequeaths the power to monitor and illegalize
contraception and the less-Godly forms of sex to state governments.
Santorum obviously can’t help himself. He babbles compulsively in public
about Satan, “spiritual warfare” (obviously to be led by him) and states having
the right to ban contraceptives, which would force sexually active American
women to remain continually pregnant until they reach menopause. But how many of
those women will vote for him in the general election, once they understand that
his worldview is that of a medieval inquisitor preparing to burn them at the
stake?
Unlike JFK, who in a 1960 speech firmly advocated separation of church and
state, Santorum clearly wants his chosen religion to dictate morality to the
masses. In fact, he recently said that Kennedy’s speech made him want to “throw
up.”
Yes, Santorum is a straight shooter who tells it like it is, but then most KKK members are
brutally honest about their
disdain for people with darker skin. Santorum has similar disdain for
“liberals,” by which he doesn’t mean just gays, atheists, agnostics and secular
humanists, but millions of married and faithful Protestants (and
probably most Catholics, since the majority of Catholics now use contraceptives and
have sex as they please).
Santorum would be Church Lady hilarious if he wasn’t two steps from the White
House. Now we know how free-thinking Iranians felt when they realized Khomeini
might actually rise to power in Iran.
It is truly ironic for so many American Protestants to support Santorum when
in a 2008 speech delivered at Ave Maria college, he said that “mainstream,
mainline” Protestantism has been seduced by the “Father of Lies” to such an
extent that Protestants are no longer Christians but have fallen prey to
“vanity” and “pride” (both hallmarks of the Devil).
Like the Ayatollah Khomeini, Rick Santorum considers mainstream America to
be the
“Great Satan.”
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