Look, I'm sure Rick Santorum, within the sanctuary of his friends and family, is a perfectly lovely guy. In fact, I have nothing against him as a person. It's just that, you know, he's unelectable. I mean, after all, he's Catholic!
I know he probably thinks he was born that way, and there's nothing he can do to change it. Heck, maybe he doesn't even want to change that. But the truth is, being Catholic is a choice, it's a lifestyle. And one rejected by the majority of other God-fearing Americans. Maybe he can be re-educated. After all, has he ever really tried being not Catholic?
After all, I wouldn't want Santorum to face the kind of prejudice that is so rife in this world if you are an aggrieved, long-abused minority, still fighting for equal rights and treatment. It just wouldn't be fair to him.
To prove this point I have culled a long list of horrible, bigoted, anti-Catholic remarks from the Internet. These are actual things people have said in public denouncing Catholicism. I guess we could call these folks Papal-phobes.
I fear the day Santorum should be confronted in public by people spewing hateful statements like these:
1. “Is anyone saying Catholic couples can’t love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too?”
2. On Catholic adoption: “A Catholic woman came up to me and said, ‘why are you denying me my right?’ I said, ‘well, because it’s not a right.’ It’s a privilege that society recognizes because society sees intrinsic value to that relationship over any other relationship.”
3. “I certainly would not approve of [a bill moving through the California legislature compels the state to add Catholic history to the state education curriculum], but there’s a logical consequence to the courts injecting themselves in creating rights and people attaching their legislative ideas to those rights that in some respects could logically flow from that. So I’m not surprised.”
4. “I have no problem with Catholicism. I have a problem with Catholic acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional Christian relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just Catholic. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who’s Catholic. If that’s their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it’s not the person, it’s the person’s actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.”
6. “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [Catholic] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything… In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included Catholics. That’s not to pick on Catholicism. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”
7. Discussing Catholic marriage: “This is an issue just like 9-11… We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when?"
8. “[Catholic marriage] threatens my marriage. It threatens all marriages. It threatens the traditional values of this country.”
9. “I would argue that the Catholic community has not made the argument. They may have made the argument as to why they want it, but they have not made any arguments as to why this is beneficial for society. They have not made any argument – convincing or otherwise, that I’m aware of – as to what the impact would be on normal, Christian marriages and what the impact would be on children …We’re into, in many respects, an unknown territory.”
10. “Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture, ... When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural Catholicism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”
11. "Would the potential attraction to Catholicism by simply having a Catholic in the White House threaten traditional Christianity by leading more Americans to a church that some Christians believe misleadingly calls itself Christian, is an active missionary church, and a dangerous cult?"
12. "I don't want to make Catholic people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."
Of course the truth is Santorum made all these statements above, only I switched the word "gay" for "Catholic."
It's amazing a guy who is from a minority that was discriminated against so heavily for so long could be so dismissive of equal rights for other minorities. After all, it just a little over 50 years ago that people thought John F. Kennedy wasn't fit to be president because he would be a vassal of the Pope in Rome.
And even today in some of the more isolated, evangelical, parts of this nation they still think that Catholics aren't actually Christians.
Note: Not all the statements above were originally about gays. Number 10 was a slam on secular Boston, where I replaced the word "liberalism" with "Catholicism." Which fit pretty well.
Number 11, was a slam on Mormons, and specifically his opponent Mitt Romney. Sounds a lot like the things people used to say about JFK, right?
And number 12, of course, was originally a blast against black people, and "welfare." Or whatever Santorum imagines welfare to be.
In other news, happy Martin Luther King day Rick!
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