I have begun sketching out little pieces about Rick Santorum several times over the past few weeks. Every time, I work myself into such a blinding fury, I short-circuit myself and go back to square one.
So I will now try again.
Rick Santorum is a Catholic politician from Pennsylvania. I say “Catholic” because it is important in his case. I would not, for example, say “Mitt Romney is a Mormon who used to be governor of Massachusetts”; it would really be irrelevant and borderline offensive (although I don’t have much respect for Willard M. Romney). Santorum makes a big deal of his religion. He is intensely anti-abortion. No, check that; he’s intensely anti-birth control. Birth control is, after all, against the will of God.
Hello, Mahmoud Ahmedinedjad!
Presidents have to be religious. If they’re not, no one would vote for them. Someone recently retold the story of Eisenhower joining the Presbyterian church shortly before the campaign season in 1952, so that no one could accuse him of being irreligious.
But Santorum is insisting on his religion. He intends to run the country based on his religious principles.
Does this make you break out in a cold sweat? It does me.
Let’s face it: lots of Americans are irreligious. I grew up in a non-churchgoing family, in a Western state to boot. We were not unusual. Going down the list:
- Dad never seemed interested in religion.
- Mom was baptized Catholic, but never really practiced it. She talked about it a lot in her later years, but never acted on it.
- Eldest brother was married in a church, but has never (so far as I know) practiced any religion.
- Eldest sister was proudly non-religious to the day she died.
- Younger sister married a moderately devout Seventh-Day Adventist and became observant. She told me, very seriously, several months before her death in 1995, about things she planned to do in heaven. I told her, with similar seriousness, that she would have to look for me and Mom in Hell, because that’d be where she would find us. We both laughed over this.
- I went to a Catholic college, (predictably) converted to Catholicism, practiced it on and off for some decades, and have as of this date sworn off it.
Here, Rick Santorum, is the typical American family. How many potential votes do you count there?
One. Out of six people.
And she’s dead.
And I would like to think that my sister Susan would be smart enough not to vote for a preening phony like you.
So that makes zero.
So huh.
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