It has been a long time since I did a diary here. I lurk and read Black Kos...the only diary I post in.....but I ran across a bit about Karen Santorum that made me wonder. I post it here to have some conversation about the turns our lives take as women and how wrong it is for us not to give other women the same right to choose......did you know that Karen Santorum lived with a man, forty years her senior, prior to her marriage to Rick Santorum? Did you know that this man is a physician and a founder of Pittsburgh's first abortion clinic? More after the squiggly thing...
Karen Santorum was a law student at the University of Pittsburgh where she met her future husband who was recruiting her to work at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. Karen was not the Christian-zealot Santorum initially wanted, but that would come as her reasoning would be transmogrified into obedience. As a nursing student at Duquesne University, Karen Santorum lived with Tom Allen, an obstetrician-gynecologist (op-gyn) who was 40 years her senior in age (she was twenty and the doctor sixty years of age) and had in fact delivered her, and had cofounded Pittsburgh’s first abortion clinic. At the time that she had the sexual affair with Allen, Karen Garver (Santorum) was pro-choice. When she met Rick Santorum, she was eager and delighted to tell Dr. Allen that Rick Santorum was pro-choice. As Dr. Allen told a Pennsylvania newspaper in 2005 (see Philadelphia Citypaper):
“When she moved out to go be with Rick, she told me I’d like him, that he was pro-choice and a humanist,” said Allen, an elderly but vibrant man, during a brief conversation on the porch of his Pittsburgh row home. “But I don’t think there’s a humanist bone in that man’s body.”
Blog Link(Rick Santorum, Opus Dei, Roman Catholicism and USA democracy and freedom)
I do not condemn Mrs. Santorum for her early life. Who has not done things, later regretted? I am concerned about people who crusade against the right of others to make similar exploratory choices and learn from them.
This information is part of a remarkable article written on the connections between the Santorum's and Opus Dei. I highly recommend reading the whole article....and coming back to discuss......tell me what you think?