Sunday, February 19, 2012

Rick "The Inquisitor" Santorum Knows What's Good for You

The increasingly Medieval edicts of Rick Santorum should not surprise. He is an extremist Opus Dei-supporting Catholic (you know, the bad guys in "The Da Vinci Code"), and the bull he spreads (as in papal) includes the condemnation of sex for any purpose other than procreative. And now: his pronunciamento on Barack Obama’s religious beliefs.

We anticipated Mr. Santorum’s degeneration to his jesuitical roots, but we weren’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

In Mr. Santorum’s pre-Enlightenment worldview, one must not only be Christian in order to serve in politics, one must be sufficiently Christian according to the extreme right wing of the extremist party hitherto termed Republican. A belief in human-caused climate change, in Mr. Santorum’s archaic labyrinth of non-thought, or an acknowledgment of the obvious fact of evolution, places one beyond the pale and unfit for public office. (Briefly on evolution: Talk to the dog breeders. Let them tell you about the dramatic variations in breeds in just the past century. Now get your mind around species variation over the course of hundreds of millions of years. This thing is not that complicated to grasp.)

According to Mr. Santorum, Barack Obama’s "agenda" (they love that word) is based on a "different theology," not a "Bible theology." We were unaware that one had to base one’s governing priorities on a "Bible theology," and we are not quite sure what those priorities would look like. Could mean anything from smiting one’s enemies to loving them – a lot of wiggle room there. Could mean anything from not eating shellfish to not suffering a witch to live, which we are fairly certain Mr. Santorum would have no problem with. Burning the wiccans, that is. He probably likes shellfish.

Mr. Santorum trots religion out front and center in his bid for the White House. Fine by us. The right-wing fundamentalists – Christian, Jewish and Muslim, all of whom have more in common with each other than they do with us normal-types – are diminishing in terms of overall percentage of the population, albeit slowly, century after century. From a peak of nearly 100 percent, in, say, the 13th century, the number of Christians in European countries continues to drop and drop. The number of fundamentalist Christians go down even more dramatically over the long sweep of history. We live in a post-Enlightenment world, and they know they are besieged by reality. If they want to rally around their birth control-hating lover of the antediluvian, they are welcome to. We encourage it. Please do make Mr. Santorum your candidate, Republican primary voters. This November the majority of us "normies" will support a party of sense and sensibility, and delight in the great sweep of victory that includes down-ballot candidates across the land.

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