Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum Called Out By HRC On Gay Rights Statements

Mitt Romney's and Rick Santorum's gay rights statements have been called out by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest gay rights advocate.

Romney and Santorum said during Sunday's NBC News-Facebook GOP presidential debate that they are opposed to discrimination based on sexual orientation.

“I made it very clear we should not discriminate in hiring policies, in legal policies,” Romney answered when asked about his 1994 statement in support of gay rights.

Santorum echoed a similar sentiment, but added that he opposes gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay couples.

HRC took exception to the comments in a statement released after the debate.

“Both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have signed the National Organization for Marriage's extremist anti-LGBT pledge,” the group said. “According to the pledge, Romney and Santorum, if elected, would set-up a McCarthy-like commission to investigate alleged incidents of 'harassment' against NOM's supporters, defend the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), push for a federal marriage amendment and appoint anti-gay judges.”

“Romney's record on protections for LGBT Americans does not match his rhetoric,” the group added, noting that the GOP candidate opposes federal workplace protections for gay workers and repeal of “Don't Ask, Don't Tell.”

The group added that Santorum's anti-gay “vitriol has become his life's work.”

Kids Are Better Off With Their Dad In Prison Than Having Two Moms

Rick Santorum wants to be seen as a blue collar, bootstraps, man of the people. But he keeps allowing himself to veer off message into weirdo rants like the one below. This is a good thing.

For the second time in as many days, Rick Santorum waded into the issue of gay marriage, suggesting it was so important for children to have both a father and mother that an imprisoned father was preferable to a same-sex parent. Citing the work of one anti-poverty expert, Santorum said, "He found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children's lives." Allowing gays to marry and raise children, Santorum said, amounts to "robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to. You may rationalize that that isn't true, but in your own life and in your own heart, you know it's true."

I Hardly Talk About The Gays

Although he's known in the foreign press primarily by the "homohater" label, Rick Santorum says that he's hardly been speaking about the gays. Igor Volsky has the quote at Think Progress:

If you’ve been following me out on the trail, I haven’t been talking a lot about this. Although I strongly believe in it. What I’ve been talking about as I did last night on my acceptance speech where didn’t talk about this issue, I talked about the importance of getting this economy going and talked about my grandfather and coming here for freedom. And this is the fundamental issue in this campaign is whether government is going to be big and obtrusive and telling people how to manage their — their lives or — and are they going to support the basic values of faith and family that allow government to be limited and allow our economy to be strong. Those are the things I talked about and did across Iowa.

The boldest of the lying no longer takes our breath away in the slightest.

Rick Santorum channels Saint Augustine

Rick Santorum, Augustinian moralist  (Credit: AP)

Following his eight-vote near miss in the Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is the man of the hour. Many people have commented on his profoundly conservative views on human sexuality. Santorum has clearly supported making abortion criminal and repealing all same-sex marriages, which he once compared to man on dog sex.

Santorum’s sexual policy clock, however, does not stop turning back in 2003 when the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws or 1973 when the Supreme Court protected abortion. Santorum would turn it all the way back to 1964, when birth control was criminal in many states. Actually, Santorum’s sexual policy prescriptions start in the fourth century, when the Catholic theologian Augustine of Hippo confronted his unruly dick. After years of Gingriching around with every female in sight, Augustine came to Jesus. Despite his newfound commitment to disciplined, godly behavior, he just couldn’t keep the good man down. But he decided that at least he could justify, if not control, his irrepressible sexual desires by confining them to the otherwise consecrated ends of monogamous marriage and the reproduction and rearing of children.

The only acceptable sex is marital reproductive sex. All the rest of the Catholic teaching on sex is commentary.

Criminalizing abortion and forbidding gay marriage are still, regrettably, outside the total nutbag category in contemporary American politics. But if the only allowable sex is Catholic-approved reproductive sex, the picture starts to look distinctly weird. Birth control, for example.

Santorum has said repeatedly that he would work to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which stopped the states from making birth control criminal. And just in case you’re thinking that’s just to take the pill from those uppity women, the Catholic teaching is quite clear: All artificial birth control is forbidden, including the good old familiar male condom. Indeed, if the only allowable sex is marital sex, fornication and adultery would be similarly acceptable. The same doctrine forbids masturbation.

Sometimes Santorum tries to moderate the extremism of his views on sexual regulation by saying that he thinks the states should decide whether to make sex acts or birth control criminal; his quarrel is with the Supreme Court butting in and telling them they couldn’t throw the Planned Parenthood docs in the slammer.

If states do “dumb” things like outlawing masturbation and condoms, the solution should be to elect different state officials. But in fact Rick Santorum doesn’t think criminalizing birth control and fornication is dumb. Consistent with his Catholic faith, he believes all artificial birth control is wrong and that sex outside of marriage is not a healthy thing for the country.

And he advocates the legislation of morality: “(I)f family and moral values break down, government gets bigger and bigger. Social issues are central to every issue we deal with in America. Unless we get the moral issues right, we will never get the economic and foreign policy issues right.”

That an advocate of legislating strict Roman Catholic sexual doctrine came within eight votes of winning the first contest for the nomination of one of the two major American political parties warrants attention. Twenty-five years ago, opposition to Griswold helped sink the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert Bork. And the country has only become more sexually and gender diverse since then. Six states and D.C. authorize same-sex marriage. The second secretary of state in a row is a female, and she gathered 18 million primary votes in her bid for the presidency. Congress repealed the exclusion of openly gay and lesbian service members from the military. Even Mississippi didn’t adopt a law making two cells a “person.”

In this context, Rick Santorum’s candidacy, and the Republican Party that hungers for it, looks like a handful of the left-behind fighting a rear-guard action against modernity, which has passed them by. It’s understandable that they would focus their efforts on sex, where Augustine struggled so hard for control.

Like Augustine and his unruly member, the modern world, especially modern capitalism, makes people feel like they have lost control. As recent events reflect, this is not foolish. They have suffered from forces way beyond their control. But the solution to gaining some mastery over the environment lies in embracing modernity through modern institutions like the rule of law, collective action, proper regulation, counter-cyclical economic policy, rather than rejecting it. There’s a reason modern contraception is called birth control. Control is good. The mistake is in mistaking Wall Street for your dick (or your wife).

Western history since the Enlightenment has been peppered with such revolts against the modern world. Usually they are a sign of desperation and find their way, unassisted, to the dustbin of history. On the rare occasion when they take hold, however, they can be extremely dangerous.

A Friendly Reminder that Santorum Pledges to Allow Ban on ALL forms of Birth Control

 

"No soup for you!"

Rick Santorum is once again discussing the dangers of contraception in his bid for president. His reason? Contraception allows people to “do sex things.”

SANTORUM: [Sex] is supposed to be within marriage. It’s supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal…but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen…This is special and it needs to be seen as special.

 

That snippet and worse goes down at the 17:40 mark.


For the record, more than 99% of women between 15 and 44 who have ever had sex have used at least one form of contraceptive. 7 out of 10 women of reproductive age who are sexually active do not want to become pregnant – but could be should contraception be made unavailable to them.

Look, if sex is an activity reserved solely for the purpose of procreation in the Santorum household, that’s just fine. It’s sad, but fine. If Rick and Karen chose to only have sex the seven times it took to create their children, that’s their decision. It explains a good number of things about Rick’s attitude toward sex to be frank, but again, their decision.

But this sex-as-procreative-instrument attitude that the Santorum’s possess is not the attitude that the overwhelming majority of the Americans believe. Hundreds of millions of Americans have sex for pleasure first, with child-bearing factoring in somewhere on the top ten list sandwiched in between “a tool for conflict resolution” and “there’s nothing good on television.”

Again, 99% of all women who are of age to become pregnant use or have used birth control. Santorum isn’t just threatening the LGBT community or making racist remarks toward African Americans this time. Now he is targeting 51% of our country.

Rick Santorum Would Annul All Marriages Of Gay Couples

Rick Santorum, who on Saturday surged past Ron Paul to a second place finish behind Mitt Romney in the latest Des Moines Register Iowa poll, has said he would annul all the marriages of gay and lesbian couples.

During an NBC Nightly News segment broadcast Friday, Santorum reiterated his support for an amendment to the United States Constitution that would ban gay marriage, then added that he would also annul all the marriages of gay couples who were legally married.

When Chuck Todd asked, “Do you think marriage is going to be a state issue?” Santorum answered: “I think marriage has to be one thing for everybody. We can't have 50 different marriage laws in this country, you have to have one marriage law.”

“What would you do with same-sex couples who got married?” Todd asked. “Would you make them get divorced?”

“Well, their marriages would be invalid. I think if the constitution says, 'Marriage is this,' then people whose marriage is not consistent with the constitution.”

Santorum added that he wanted to be “tolerant” but he could not ignore the “real consequences” of marriage equality.

“Same-sex couples can contract for just about everything that they privileges they get versus marriage except direct government benefits.”

“Marriage … is a special relationship. I can be your friend and that's a very good and important relationship. … The love I have for my aunt is a very important relationship. But it's not as important … for the health of society of men and women coming together, joining together in marriage, having children and raising those children for the future of society.”