Okay, I’ll admit it. I fell victim to it, along with some other people I know. I am just now recovering from a serious bout of Santorum panic.
I don’t think I can be completely blamed for it. Santorum is one of those scary people known as social conservatives. This means that on top of the usual right-wing predatory philosophy of “If you happen to be old or sick, you are a weaker specimen, and need to be rejected from the pack”, he also carries an unappetizing layer of push-it-down-your-throat religiosity. I suppose the pompous morality is there to try to hide the predatory thinking, something that the libertarians, in all their charming honesty, do without.
Anyway, Santorum wants to annul all the previously established gay marriages–in the name, no doubt, of liberty. He would like to allow states to ban contraceptives. As he said in an interview, contraceptives are bad since they give one all kinds of sexual license. In short, he represents the kind of small town thinking I instinctively fear—because I am someone who comes from a small town. Sure, a small town in Eastern Europe. But let me share a little secret: Small towns are the same all over the world. They’re FRIGHTENING.
If I want more proof that Rick inhabits a different planet than me, I need look no further than the sweater vests he is currently hawking to anyone who will donate $100 or more to his campaign. I’m not sure why, but Christian conservatives even have a fashion sense all their own. The make-up styles of the female Fox news anchors have induced bouts of panic in me as well.
So when Santorum came in second in Iowa, I freaked out. I forwarded Facebook posts with all of his scariest quotes, and left rambling comments on blogs. I envisioned a Santorum presidency and tried to decide which country I would flee to when all the condoms had run out.
Of course, I had forgotten one thing: this was Iowa. It was the place where Huckabee had, once upon a time, come in first. The nominees don’t come out of Iowa.
And so thankfully, things are now in a much more predictable place. According to the latest reports from the BBC, the crowds at Santorum speeches are still full of energy, but much smaller. He also made the mistake of wading into his “gay marriage equals polygamy” stuff with some college students, and got heckled and booed. Most importantly, another BBC news article (yes, I luvs the BBC) interviewed a few people in his audience who said they didn’t want to hear anymore about abortion and gay marriage. They wanted to hear about the economy. It’s still the economy, stupid, not theology.
Well, I have been miraculously healed from my irrational moment of panic and feel much better. Now to get ready for the real thing: Romney and months of boring debates about tax code and health insurance. Hallelujah!
01/13/2012 at 2:33 pm
Hope the recovery is still going well!!
And I do think there are good reasons to be optimistic about the political future these days.. this year will change a whole lot with some belated reactions to the crash of ’08 and three decades of theft and fraud. Times are changing again – and this time for the better!
01/13/2012 at 8:23 pm
Well, hello there Mr. Sunshine 🙂 Bringing a little political optimism to my dark corner of the Northwest. I certainly hope you’re right, I’m trying to inject some positive thinking into my sceptical mind as we speak!
01/16/2012 at 11:41 pm
Did Mr. Rick really say that about contraception? That’d DOOM him in a general election. We’re a pretty sorry lot, but even a fair bit of the sorriest among us would do a double-take on that. I mean sex, and the right to not procreate, is sacred by all swingers, polyamourous gadflys, closet right-wing pedophiles and the fringe liberal left who – get this – have decided not to procreate so as to let the speaking-in-tongues, wide toilet stance, holy roller nutball right populate the planet with their equally pathological blue-blood offspring thereby ensuring total populace dominance whereby they control every state in American not named California or Vermont. And parts of Manhattan. Surely, therefore, they cannot condone the end of birth control!
S’ economics, see? Plus summa their largest donors sell contraceptives and chin-dongs, so putting them out of business would hurt the bottom line. And it’s all about the bottom, eventually, ain’t it?
I’m just sayin’.
01/18/2012 at 8:13 pm
Yeah, the fact that so many of us lefties (including me) choose not to have kids is, in the long term, not a smart decision. I just can’t help it, though–I’m not fascinated by babies and wouldn’t make a great mother. I comfort myself with the thought that some portion of the young in each generation tends to rebel against their parents and become liberals.
But I do think Mr. Santorum will lose out because of views like this. Last statistic I heard, over 90% of women in this country use some form of contraception. Not very good odds for the calendar method political platform.
I don’t mind things being about the bottom line…I fear the place where rational bottom line thinking ends and wild-eyed religion begins.
01/29/2012 at 10:34 pm
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