Mitt Romney may not be a reptoid, but one thing is clear: he would claim to be one if he thought a majority of voters in any upcoming election wanted him to be one.
The opposite is true of Rick Santorum.
He is fairly honest about his record and his opinions. (You can’t get a 100 percent honest politician in America today. Voter demands make honesty an anti-survival trait.)
That makes him the most nearly honest of the current crop of Republicans running for president. It also makes him far scarier than any reptoid.
Rick Santorum has a right to his opinions. But what he is seeking is the power to enforce his opinions on you, whether you agree with him or not.
For the past couple of weeks, middle-aged and elderly men have been rampaging like demented mastodons across the cultural landscape, trumpeting their opinions about vaginas and the dreadful things that women do with them. The purest example of this idiocy was Representative Darrell Issa’s hearing about contraception policy that excluded female witnesses.
The ostensible issue was the Obama administration’s mandate that insurance plans cover contraception for women. Twenty-eight states already had such mandates in place and they have not sparked a significant amount of controversy, but politicians eager for a new battle in the culture war started to make a big deal out of the issue.
President Obama responded, as he typically does in these situations, with a compromise: religious institutions with a moral objection to contraception could claim an exemption, and the cost of the contraceptives under those plans would be borne by the insurance companies. Insurance companies are glad to bear this expense, since contraception is cheaper than childbirth or abortion.
In passing, one would think that anyone opposed to abortion would be in favor of contraception, but that’s talking common sense, which has nothing to do with culture-war politics. Bishops and the politicians who love them were still making noise about that matter.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the culture war. A lot of the politicians who were leading the anti-contraception charge started to look around and noticed that they were all alone out there.
Contraception is widely used in this country. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “Among women who are currently at risk of unintended pregnancy, 88 percent overall—and 87 percent of Catholics—use a method other than natural family planning.”
Oral contraceptives are used as medication for other conditions, too: endometriosis, ovarian cysts and dysmenorrhea, to name only three. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6470632)
Women tend to know this. They need to know this. Men who care about the women in their lives also know this, or should know it. And so the war against contraception is pretty short on recruits.
When the right-wing politicians and pundits who had been forcing their outrage on this issue realized it wasn’t getting them anywhere, they started to run away from it as fast as they could. Guys like Rush Limbaugh even started to claim that Democrats had made up the controversy for their own benefit.
Anyone who knows the history of the modern Democratic Party knows that they simply don’t have the cunning involved for that kind of maneuver, but it is a nice thought, anyway.
But Santorum’s honesty is the biggest stumbling block for anyone trying to claim that the right-wing isn’t crusading against contraception. He’s insisted repeatedly that he would defund coverage of contraception. (See an example on video here, during an extended interview, around 17:50: http://youtu.be/KN7WfIZh690 .)
Nor is this the only way that Santorum is out of step with the rest of America. Santorum is both famous and infamous for his belief that the government has the right to regulate private sexual acts between consenting adults, because he claims there is no right to privacy. In the notorious “man-on-dog” interview he insisted, “You say, well, it’s my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that’s antithetical to strong healthy families.”
So there it is. If he is elected president, you will have the right to live according to his view of religion.
Why do I spend this much space writing about the odd opinions of this odd man?
Because, among other reasons, he’s coming here. Representative Bob Latta is sponsoring an appearance by Rick Santorum, Grover Norquist and other ignotables of the far right on March 3. If that is the sort of thing you’re into, I’m not here to judge you; you can attend the dinner for $25 dollars and bask in the sunny sanctimony of the ex-senator.
If you’d rather protest Santorum and his narrow views, you can do that, too. Most of the student body will be out of town for spring break (coincidentally?), but there will be a protest nonetheless.
If you’ve read this far, it won’t surprise you to hear that Santorum and his views repel me. But there is one thing that’s valuable about him: he says what others only think.
That will give us a chance to talk back when he comes to our town.
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