Let's Get Political

Analysis of Rick Santorum’s Positions

Pennsylvania ex-senator Rick Santorum is attempting to win the presidential primary for the Republican nomination. He is a very staunch neoconservative as well as a hardcore pro-lifer. He is very religiously motivated and is against gay marriage in every form. My main concern with Rick Santorum is his horrible stance on abortion. My other concern with Mr. Santorum is his hate speech against the LBGT community.


Mr. Santorum has made his position on abortion very clear. He wants abortion illegal, even in cases of rape. He made this view known in the August 2011 Iowa Straw Poll GOP debate in Ames Iowa.

Q: In June, you said, "I believe that any doctor who performs an abortion should be criminally charged for doing so." You would allow no exceptions for cases of rape and incest?

SANTORUM: You know, the US Supreme Court on a recent case said that a man who committed rape could not be killed, could not be subject to the death penalty, yet the child conceived as a result of that rape could be. That to me sounds like a country that doesn't have its morals correct. That child did nothing wrong. That child is an innocent victim. To be victimized twice would be a horrible thing. It is an innocent human life. It is genetically human from the moment of conception. And it is a human life. And we in America should be big enough to try to surround ourselves and help women in those terrible situations who've been traumatized already. To put them through another trauma of an abortion I think is too much to ask. And so I would absolutely stand and say that one violence is enough.


This is a very disturbing view with regard to abortion. Rick Santorum believes a rape victim should be required, by law, to carry a rapists baby to term, and raise the child. He might as well go the whole nine yards and force the rapist to pay fifty shekels to the woman’s father so he can marry her. This is an extremely draconian view to take in our modern society. Mr. Santorum seems to be letting his religious convictions cloud his rational judgment. He also seems to be clouding the issue by calling the fetus (or blastula, gastrula, etc.) a child. A child,
by biological definition, is a human between infancy and puberty. Only recently have religious zealots attempted to add some Orwellian doublespeak to our words with regard to redefining the word child to mean “unborn fetus”.


My other concern with Mr. Santorum is his hate speech against the LBGT (Lesbian Bisexual Gay Transsexual) community. Mr. Santorum likened, indirectly, homosexuality with “man on dog” behavior. This quote shows the full context of what was said. "In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality. . .

If you were to actually break down that statement, he essentially put homosexuality under the same label as “man on child, man on dog” when he claimed that marriage was none of those things, in any society (Which is actually not the case).

So, Rick Santorum is a horrific choice for any type of position of power. It is evidently The case that Mr. Santorum allows his religious and personal, moral convictions to cloud his judgment with regard to other human beings’ basic rights over their bodies and life style choices.