Preach, preach, preach. (Gage Skidmore)
The
Los Angeles Times:
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."
So basically, having an imprisoned parent who doesn't care if you exist is preferable to having no parent at all, but having a gay parent is like having no parent at all? Is that where he's going with this? I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in "Santorum logic."
This is vintage Santorum. He doesn't hate homosexuals, he's just of the belief (hint hint) that they destroy everything they touch, have little capabilities for genuine human emotion, and that it's better to have a parent who is a felon, or who has abandoned you, or is a felon who has abandoned you than to have a gay parent.
And yet he's being held up as a perfectly reasonable, sensible Republican contender for president, someone who really deserves attention if you're not into that whole Mitt Romney vision of Wall Street turning us all into Soylent Green.
The bigotry this guy latches onto is truly something to behold. While pundits like Will and Krauthammer work as Santorum boosters, and Kathleen Parker vouches for his "personal honor," we're all supposed to forget that Santorum has a history of similar statements, statements that make it clear he thinks gay people are something less than human.
Of course, that's a large part of Santorum's appeal. He's not exactly a foreign policy wonk, or a domestic policy wonk, or a budget wonk or anything else; he is known primarily (if not exclusively) for his sanctimonious moral hectoring. Republicans can't exist as a party unless they are reacting to some imagined existential terror, so Rick Santorum telling the party that gay parents are worse than felons or child abandoners is exactly what the far-right of his party wants to hear.