Ah, Rick Santorum, returning from his anti-”Islamofacism” post-Senate efforts to familiar homo-hate territory. He’s back in the news, penning a ridiculous op-ed in the Philly Inquirer, “The Elephant in the Room: A wake-up call on gay marriage after ‘03 alarm went unheeded.”
Bigot! Hate-monger! Homophobe!And look, he’s worried that the elimination of discrimination will make all of the heterosupremacists look back at the good old days when homos were on the run.Those were just a few of the terms hurled my way in 2003 when I said that the Supreme Court’s Texas sodomy decision opened the door to the redefinition of marriage.
When I wasn’t ducking the epithets, I was being laughed at, mocked, and given the crazy-uncle-at-the-holidays treatment by the media. Or I was being told I should resign from my leadership post by some Senate colleagues.
Five years later, do I regret sounding the alarm about marriage? No.
I’m just saddened that time has proved right those of us who worried about the future of marriage as the union of husband and wife, deeply rooted not only in our traditions, our faiths, but in the facts of human nature: as Pope Benedict said, “The cradle of life and love,” connecting mothers and fathers to their children.
(Cue epithets: Bigot! Hate-monger! Homophobe!)
The latest distressing news came last week in California. The state Supreme Court there ruled, 4-3, that same-sex couples can marry.
In doing so, four judges rejected a statute that passed in a referendum with 61 percent of the vote that defined marriage as a union of one man and one woman.
Let me go out on another limb here and make another crazy prediction. Within 10 years, clergy will be sued or indicted for preaching on certain Bible passages dealing with homosexuality and churches, and church-related organizations will lose government contracts and even their tax-exempt status.Have fun with the rest.The California judges also ruled, for the first time in American legal history, that sexual orientation is just like race.
The California court just declared that those of us who see marriage as the union of husband and wife are the legal equivalent of racists. And openly racist groups and individuals can be denied government benefits because of their views, including professional licenses (attorney, physicians, psychiatrists, marriage counselors), accredited schools, and tax-exempt status for charities.
43 Responses to “Little Ricky does his man-on-dog bark in op-ed on same-sex marriage”
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Well, ya know, he is a bigot, a hatemonger, and a homophobe.
Most of his career has been defined along those lines.
Why won’t he leave? God, the guy has one routine and he just never shuts up.
Retroactive abortion on aisle 1, please.
When I wasn’t ducking the epithets, I was being laughed at, mocked, and given the crazy-uncle-at-the-holidays treatment by the media. Or I was being told I should resign from my leadership post by some Senate colleagues. . . . (Cue epithets: Bigot! Hate-monger! Homophobe!) . . . Let’s put aside the tired argument that the people should have a say in the laws of their government. That is so 18th-century white-male drivel.
Note that the guy can’t simply make his case. He has to festoon it with self-pity and El Cardo Victimo.
But here is is some of his argument:
Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent for firstborn children. Too bad for those kids who probably won’t have a dad around . . .
Right, because there’s a clear causal relationship between same-sex marriage and OOW birthrates, which he’s pulled directly out of his ass.
Also, what’s he saying about men in the second sentence? The implication is: what man would stick around to take care of his own firstborn kid and its mother if he wasn’t saddled with a marriage license? (Is this what he tells Mrs. Santorum?) I know guys like Rick like to make out feminists as men-haters, but I don’t know any (including me) who doesn’t have a ‘way better opinion of men in general than he does.
Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent for firstborn children. Too bad for those kids who probably won’t have a dad around . . .
He’s so completely full of shit. They aren’t growing up without parents. Parents tend to marry after the birth of their first child. They’re still growing up in a context of material and social support. Indeed, because of the Norwegian welfare state, their children enjoy a higher standard of material support than many children in this marriage.
These wingnuts are incapable of doing any kind of analysis because they’re hostile to thought. He may not be lying because he’s just too stupid to realize his mistake. On the other hand, he is incredibly dishonest…
After my grandmother died, my grandfather got remarried. He was 78, his bride was 76, so they were in a marriage that could never have produced children–besides, they had five between them already. When he got sick, and decisions had to be made about his health care, guess who made them? When the money he and my grandmother had saved over the years was disbursed, guess who it was disbursed to? Not his children, in either case. Marriage isn’t about children, it’s a contract between two adults. As such, any two unrelated adults ought to be able to enter into it.
I love the argument that because same-sex marriage is now legal somewhere, that proves outright his alarmist rhetoric. Nevermind that it’s been legal somewhere else for a few years and his alarmist rhetoric hasn’t come true. Nevermind that those statistics prove not a damn thing. Gay marriage is happening and he was right all along.
On a light pole where I work (suburban Philly), somebody plastered a bumper sticker that reads, “Santorum Is Italian.”
I have no idea what to make of that.
“The California court just declared that those of us who see marriage as the union of husband and wife are the legal equivalent of racists.”
…if that’s the ONLY definition you see as morally permissible, you ARE bigots. Racism, in general, is NOT illegal. And bigotry against LGBT people isn’t illegal either. The legal implications only come up when you seek to use your bigotry as reason to discriminate…
“And openly racist groups and individuals can be denied government benefits because of their views…”
…only if those views are acted upon to actually discriminate against people…
“…including professional licenses (attorney, physicians, psychiatrists, marriage counselors)…”
…WTF? What the hell is he talking about? If this was true, Santorum would have been denied entering the bar in Pennsylvania…
“…accredited schools, and tax-exempt status for charities.”
Look. If Bob Jones had believed that interracial dating was wrong, but implemented no policy against it, there would have been no legal problem.
Be as much of a bigot as you want. Hate people for any reason you want, the dumber the better. Got red hair? Hate ‘em! Still have a foreskin? Hate ‘em! Like Everybody Loves Raymond? Hate Them!!!
Write letters to your local paper, plaster stickers on your car, express your hate on your answering machine greeting, whatever the hell you want.
But refuse to rent your house because of your bigotry? - now you’re in trouble. Have a rule at your school which receives public funding against interracial dating? - in legal trouble. Tell your church members they will be excommunicated for voting for the gay candidate? - lose your tax exemption.
Why is any of that so hard to understand, and why is any of that considered “discriminatory” against the bigots?…
These wingnuts are incapable of doing any kind of analysis because they’re hostile to thought. He may not be lying because he’s just too stupid to realize his mistake. On the other hand, he is incredibly dishonest… (MAJeff @ 5)
True enough, but he’s also clutching at straw[men]. His real argument begins and ends at: He finds gay sex ick, icky, icky (1). Unfortunately, he knows that’s an idiotic reason for his position, so he has to scrape the barrel for something else to support it.
You find a lot of this pattern in ‘winger screeds; it’s not that they’re averse to facts and logic–they’d use ‘em every time if they could. It’s just that Fs & L don’t usually favor them, so they’re forced to look around for other stuff when they try to make their cases. Facts, as the man said, have a liberal slant.
(1) Actually, guys like Santorum find sex icky in general, but he’s forced to give straight sex a pass under certain limited circumstances as a concession to reproductive needs. (I can only imagine what his physical relationship with Mrs. S. is. No, wait–I can’t, but maybe Stephen King can.)
Why does every article he writes start with the phrase, “The Elephant in the Room”? I thought he was referring to Ellen’s comment during her interview with McCain, but other articles he wrote for this publication are titled things like “The Elephant in the Room: One-Day Democrats: A bad idea” and “The Elephant in the Room: Why conservatives should support McCain” and “The Elephant in the Room: Why conservatives should support McCain” and “The Elephant in the Room: Let’s call this ‘terrorism’ by its real name “.
The man must shovel some serious elephant shit, with that many elephants in the room….
“and church-related organizations will lose government contracts and even their tax-exempt status.”
God for-fucking-bid. What business does our government have supporting churches, anyway?
I think you need to add “man on dog” to your tags for this article. I don’t think the tags you’ve got describe the article accurately enough.
Anyway, Santorum is so obviously a hack it’s not funny. The crap about Norway? That’s him searching for evidence to prove his conclusion, like every other Republican hack. What’s happening in similar countries? Isn’t this a “problem” in other Scandinavian countries that have not legalized gay marriage (and in other countries in Europe as well)? Not that he cares, since it wouldn’t support his point.
I’d be happier than hell if churches and church-related organizations lost their tax exempt status. For the vast majority of these churches and organizations, it is no longer about helping the poor in their communities. It is about sending missionaries to foreign countries to bring souls to the Lord. Or else you don’t get any missionary food.
I am sick to fucking death of my tax dollars enabling these frauds.
Within 10 years, clergy will be sued or indicted for preaching on certain Bible passages dealing with homosexuality and churches, and church-related organizations will lose government contracts and even their tax-exempt status.
He says this like it’s a bad thing.
I had the second most amount of fun watching Santorum bite the dust of defeat in 2006.
The most fun I had? Watching my state’s former Senator (and GOP golden boy) George Allen commit political suicide on tape.
“I am sick to fucking death of my tax dollars enabling these frauds.”
It says right in the bible that churches should be free of taxes. Let me find where it is and I’ll prove it to you…
I’m sure it’s here somewhere, just a little more looking…
Looking a little more…
Just a bit more…
Okay, I can’t find it.
But I’m sure that’s what god would want - in fact he told me exactly that last night. I swear!
He spoke to me and told me churches are exempt from Caesar’s taxes (god says things that way). God has a voice just like James Earl Jones - but not Black, of course.
Well, I don’t think he’s Black. None of the pictures show him Black. No, I haven’t actually seen him myself, but I’m sure if he was Black he would have said something about it, don’t you think?
So, no taxes on churches. God said so…
I con’t believe I’m saying this about Rick Santorum of all people, but the bits you quote from his op-ed actually sound, well, pretty accurate to me. I mean, the part about churches getting sued for their hate speech is probably overly optimistic, but I wouldn’t be shocked if someone brought such a suit in a few years and had it shut down by the courts.
The big point that Santorum gets right is that Lawrence was a big flashing neon sign from the Supremes that they were ready to green-light gay marriage. They denied that this was the case, other moderate Democrats denied that this was the case in order to keep the centrists on their side, but it was the case and many conservatives (including Scalia, in his dissent) called them on their bullshit. And the conservatives were right. Even if the Supremes as presently constituted would probably no longer allow marriage equality (and for that matter, probably would have upheld the statute in Lawrence), the precedent has emboldened the state courts to find their own solutions. The holding from Lawrence is logically incompatible with barring gay people from getting married, and this fact is trickling down to the people in the form of marriage equality at the state level.
I really, really do hope that the rest of Santorum’s predictions will be borne out, but I think he’s being his usual hysterical self. The homo-hating religious patriarchy that runs this country is showing a few cracks, but it’s got a lot of fight still left in it. Don’t despair, Ricky.
Churches are NOT going to get sued for “hate speech.” This is the bogus argument that right-wingers use to make people who don’t undertand free speech law scared.
As we all know, churches can pretty much say anything as long as it isn’t overt political speech. They can say whatever they want about gays, the government is not going to come knocking on their door. Same goes for lawsuits about priests refusing to marry same-sex couples– clergy can already refuse to marry people. It’s an absurd, ignorant argument.
What Santorum and others skip over is that the CA Supremes declared that gays and lesbians are a “protected class” like race, gender and RELIGION.
At this point, with SCOTUS as currently constituted, it would be very surprising if they do anything more than remain neutral regarding equal marriage rights. And it wouldn’t be surprising at all if they figured out some bogus reason to overrule state courts.
These are people who decided women are not smart enough to make decisions about their own bodies just a while back. Who’s to say they might not take orientation as a reason to declare gay people cannot properly be allowed to decide marriage is for them?
After Alito and Roberts were added to Scalia and Thomas, I have zero faith in SCOTUS. And there’s no reason for hope until at least one of those “fine gentleman” is no longer on the court…
Of course churches are going to get sued for hate speech. In a country where someone sues a dry-cleaner for losing their pants and only offering to buy them a new pair, somebody, either queer or straight, is going to sue a preacher somewhere for saying something they don’t like about marriage. Suit won’t succeed, but it’s in the very nature of monkeys on a typewriter that it will be filed.
Indicted, unless they’re actually preaching to people who go out and proximately commit hate crime, not so much. In fact, if Santorum weren’t such a lying pig I’d tell him to put his money where his ghostwriter’s fingers are.
Everything else seems pretty reasonable — if you’re a doctor and you give a lower quality of care to queer patients than straight ones, or a lawyer and you don’t give as good legal advice to queer clients as straight ones, or if you’re a real estate agent and don’t show equivalent properties to queer buyers as to straight ones, then by golly you should lose your license.
Clergy won’t be arrested for refusing to marry homosexuals. It’s such a stupid “slippery slope” argument. Churches already discriminate on basis of creed, a protected class. A Catholic Church is not forced to offer a High Nuptial Mass to Jews or Muslims. Fundy churches aren’t required to accommodate Catholics or Unitarians, even though they are nominally the same faith.
Now, they may lose their tax-exempt status, and really, why should they be tax-exempt anyway? If they can defend 501(c)3 status and purpose, fine and dandy. But you can’t really tell me that the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker folk are non-profit.
Doesn’t Jesus himself say something about rendering to Caesar what belongs to Caesar? So what’s the big deal? Split your funds into trusts if you must, and if you are feeding and clothing the poor, you definitely fulfill a charitable purpose. If you’re just promoting bigotry? Not so much, but maybe you could still justify it to the IRS.
‘Why does every article he writes start with the phrase, “The Elephant in the Room”?’
He also referred to his race against Bob Casey as “the lead DOG on the sled” among the Senate races…lol.
I think little Ricky just doesn’t understand that most people don’t care what other people do. More than that, a lot of us think that marriage equity is a good thing.
And I would like to think an American, especially one who served in the legistlative branch, would understand unelected judges are there as a check against the legislative branch and the tyranny of the majority.
You cannot just legislate away rights, no matter how much you want to, which is why, eventually, all these DOMAs will fail.
Also, Republican appointed judges came to this ruling, another point the right leaves out in their railing against “activist judges”. It was your own ’strict conservationists” who interpreted the state constitution!
“Also, Republican appointed judges came to this ruling, another point the right leaves out in their railing against “activist judges”. It was your own ’strict conservationists” who interpreted the state constitution!”
The opinions of the State Supreme Court, just on the basis of being in California, can be easily dismissed by any “true conservative”. Plus the CA Supremes are based in San Francisco, and we all know what THAT means.
While as a resident of Cali I’m pleasantly surprised by by the ruling, I’m not naive enough to think it will mean much to the forces of bigotry, in California or anywhere else…
Justice Kennedy wrote the 6-3 opinion in Lawrence. Even with O’Connor (who was actually weak on Lawrence) gone, the court is still solidly pro-sodomy.
MikeEss: :0
Of course he’s not black. Everybody knows that ancient peoples in the middle east had blonde hair and blue eyes. I mean, my people are Arabs and we all have…uh…blonde hair and…um…blue….aryan features. Really.
(Well, actually, I DO have blue eyes, but that is a nod to my Irish da. Otherwise? Lebanese-looking all the way).
You gotta love the mental and logical gymnastics of the whole Norway thing - which they are trotting out more and more lately.
It didn’t allow gay marriage - it allowed domestic partnerships for both gays and straights (can’t discriminate against the straights, can we?).
So gay people got hitched, and straight people got hitched.
But for the purpose of doom-saying, the gay partnerships count as marriage, but the straight ones don’t. If the domestic partnerships among straight people get counted along with marriages, they didn’t have a significant drop, nor are there really hoards of illegitimate kids with no daddies running around.
Ricky, pick one. If the gays are getting married, then so are the straights. And if straight people not going for full out marriage bothers you, then advocate marriage equality for all and abolish the partnerships.
Maybe we need a Constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of the Senate from bozos who don’t understand when a legal decision is sound and proper.
This is something that really pisses me off. People like mixture-of-lube-and… er, I mean, people like Santorum seem to think that the legal process is something that should be attacked and treated with contempt so long as it is not rendering decisions preferred by them and folks like them.
This country needs leadership that accepts our nation’s principles.
Peter H:
Well, they do (sorta) have one thing right about the Norway (and the general european) thing: people no longer feel they need the authorization of some guy (yes, guy) in a funny collar or a black shirt or whatever to live their lives together, including having kids. That part of “traditional marriage”, where churches get to collect a cut on issuing people authorizations to live together without being ostracized or jailed, is indeed declining.
Of course, willingness to allow same-sex marriage is really more of a symptom or a correlate of that phenomenon, not a cause.
paul @30 and PeterH @ 28: I still remember in high school having a conversation about whether I would live with someone before marriage. My best friend, raised in Canada until age 9, said “….Everyone lives together in Canada,” in tones of “Why exactly is this even an issue?” (She moved from Montreal to the Bible Belt. It must have been an adjustment.)
The major reason I see to get married, as a straight woman, is to give my partner legal standing as my next of kin. (The second reason is to publicly state my commitment, but that can be done in a religious or non-religious ceremony with no legal effect, and many same-sex couples who can’t get legally married do this.) If domestic partnership laws were better, then yeah, getting married would no longer be as much of a time-sensitive priority — hence Norway.
Along with this point, I think Santorum would have been better served to look at Massachusetts — what has happened to straight marriage and out-of-wedlock birth rates there since they started letting Teh Gheys get married? My money’s on “no significant change.” I’m going to see if I can look it up, just for my own curiosity.
Bad dancing in cowboy hats?
My money’s on still having one of the lower divorce rates in the country and well below that of the red staters who don’t think gays should marry.If I’m right, I want my prize to be more Republican logic along the lines of “See! If we let gays marry, the divorce rate will go down!”
‘Splodey heads EVERYwhere!
Eric Zorn (chicago tribune - change of subject) had a pretty good thought, IMNSHO, yesterday on a solution to the “gay marriage” controversy. Curious to know what readers here think.
If you are talking about the proposal to reserve the word marriage for only those relationships blessed by churches and switch over all civil contracts to the words “civil unions” or such - no. Bad idea.
There is too much civil law directly linked to the word “marriage” - and even leaving gay people out of the mix, it sets up (at least rhetorical) second-class status to people who get hitched by the civil authorities.
Sets up (or perpetuates) the “real marriages only happen in church” misunderstanding.
If anyone seriously proposed taking the word “marriage” away from everyone - call church weddings “covenants” and civil weddings “civil unions” and then let the word “marrriage” be fully applicable (and legally meaningless) to all of them, I might go along.
After all, a married man is a husband, a married woman is a wife, but they are both legally spouses.
And it isn’t a solution to marriage equality for gay people anyway - lots of gay people get married in church now, they just don’t get legal benefits. Most of these “compromise proposals” conveniently ignore that reality, and won’t extend the word marriage to same-sex couples even if they do get married in church, which pretty much explodes the underlying agenda of their proposal.
All these gymnastics are really about one thing - getting to hold onto gay people not really being the same as or as good as “real people.” When they talk about how “Americans feel about gay people” as though the two categories are distinct, you see it as well. Well, sorry. gay people ARE Americans (those of us who are, that is) and we ARE citizens.
One aspect of the California court decision just keeps coming up - once you have already granted that gay people should get all of the privileges and responsibilities of marriage, what reason is left to deny the word marriage, other than pure animus?
“…once you have already granted that gay people should get all of the privileges and responsibilities of marriage, what reason is left to deny the word marriage, other than pure animus?”
There seem to be many fundnuts for whom that is quite enough to justify denying it…
Ah yes, gloom and doom with out all the … EVIDENCE!
Come on, MA legalized universal marriage rights in 2003 and implemented in 2004. Last I checked, it hasn’t had any of the impacts predicted.
What impact has it had? Well, with 2/9 households on my street getting married as a result, it has increased community bonding, lawnmower sharing is up, snowblowing of driveways has increased, and jumpstarts are up 200%.
Horrible consequences, I tell ya. Horrible.
I think all you need to do is dig out similar comments fulminated after _Loving vs Virginia_ and no-fault divorce.
But exactly, Pete. Marriage - with all that sacrament/holy stuff belongs in church. We need to unlink that term. As a het atheist, I wish civil unions would have ben a possibility. This way nobody get secnd class status (and laws can be amended to take care of the archaic language or it gets grandmothered in.)
apologies for typos, previous post.
Divorce rates appear to be stable or down in Massachusetts since the legalization of gay marriage and Mass consistently has one of the lowest divorce rates in the US. Hmm…
“Of course churches are going to get sued for hate speech. In a country where someone sues a dry-cleaner for losing their pants and only offering to buy them a new pair, somebody, either queer or straight, is going to sue a preacher somewhere for saying something they don’t like about marriage. Suit won’t succeed, but it’s in the very nature of monkeys on a typewriter that it will be filed.”
And what’s amusing is that:
1) The ACLU would come down on the person suing like a ton of 1st Amendment bricks, and
2) Within a week, and into the foreseeable future, rightwing radio/ email spam/ etc. would be ranting about how the ACLU tried to sue churches for hate speech. (See, ie, here)
—
Santorum’s column is one of the main reasons I don’t buy the Inquirer anymore. I don’t have a problem with them running columns by conservatives; it’s that they somehow felt compelled to provide a soapbox for that deeply unpleasant man after he had been roundly rejected not just by Philly voters (that’s a given - he only got around 16% of the Philly vote in ‘06) but by the state as a whiole, with the biggest margin of defeat for an incumbent Senator in over 25 years. Let him drag his own grungy little box around to stand on while he incomprehensively rants at the people walking by.
——-
Mr. Frothy Mix: ” . . . and churches, and church-related organizations will lose government contracts and even their tax-exempt status.”
MikeEss: “ Look. If Bob Jones had believed that interracial dating was wrong, but implemented no policy against it, there would have been no legal problem.”
Interestingly, it’s been argued (by, for example,Randall Balmer) that the real issue that set off the religious right’s mass incursion into politics wasn’t abortion or school prayer or any of that - it was, in fact, the IRS’ attempt to take away Bob Jones’ U. tax-exempt status due to blatant racial discrimination. I suspect for the leaders of the Christianist movement, that’s what it’s all about, and what it has been all about: the right not just to be bigoted asses in the name of religion - which, as noted, is largely protected by the same Constitution they hate so much - but to get to openly discriminate against their fellow citizens in non-religious activities while receiving special gov’t privileges and happily suckling at the gov’t teat.
Bananaphone asked:
Because that’s the title of his bi-weekly column in The Philadelphia Inquirer.