SANTORUM: LIMBAUGH IN A SWEATER VEST?
Charles Blow unearths a raw document from Rick Santorum's past:
... Santorum seems to have an unhealthy fixation with, and passionate disdain for, the 1960s and the sexual freedoms that followed.
To fully understand Santorum's strident rejection of the 1960s, it's instructive to recall a speech and question-and-answer session he gave in 2008 to a course on religion and politics at the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life in Washington.
The speech was interesting, but the answers he gave to the questions that followed were truly illuminating.
In response to a question about the kinds of words he had heard "attached to religion and politics" during his years in the Senate, Santorum ventured off onto sex:
"It comes down to sex. That's what it's all about. It comes down to freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy. And you're dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that's the most central to me. And that's the way it's looked at."
Blow finds quote after quote like that in the Q&A session; he concludes, understandably, that Santorum is obsessed with sex as practiced by anyone other than legally married heterosexual couples.
But there's more here, I think.
Santorum's obsession isn't just revulsion at the thought that people are doing sex things he wouldn't do. It's a demand for control. It's anger at the thought that people don't respect his authority, both for its own sake and because he's the self-appointed surrogate for God and the Founding Fathers.
Look at the quote above. He and his fellow conservatives, he tells us, want to say to people, hey, you don't have the right "to do all of the sexual freedoms you want" -- but when they do, those people say nasty things to Santorum and his friends! How dare they!
Elsewhere in the material Blow quotes, Santorum says:
This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that's sex. And the whole abortion culture, it's not about life. It's about sexual freedom. That's what it's about. Homosexuality. It's about sexual freedom. All of the things are about sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them.
Again: "they hate to be called on them." How dare they resent being "called on" these things! Santorum and his pals should be able to do that any time they want! And their worldview should prevail!
This reminds me of Rush Limbaugh arguing that, in return for contraceptive coverage, he gets to act like a misogynist high-roller waving $100 bills in a strip club -- he gets to call the women sluts and prostitutes and keep a video as a souvenir. Why doesn't he have that right? In a sane world, he'd bark orders and all the sex freaks would obey those orders. Rick Santorum feels exactly the same way.
3 comments:
Maybe Freud was on to something when he tagged sexual repression as the root of neurosis and mental illness. Europeans stopped bathing altogether during the Dark Ages, because the Church thought public baths were sinful. They didn't really bathe regularly again until around the 19th century when someone came up with the idea of a private bathtub. They're always about protecting purity of essence and precious bodily fluids.
Considering that 'Sanctorum' was all of 11 years old when Woodstock took place, and wouldn't have gotten out of high school until the mid-70's (lucky ducky, missing 'Nam & the draft) - WTF does he know about "the 60's"? Nothing 1st-hand, but no doubt plenty of 2nd-hand BS fed him by the various clerics who, as it were, educated him. Kind of like what he "knows" about human sexuality and most other subjects he presumes to address.
Your comment,
"It's anger at the thought that people don't respect his authority, both for its own sake and because he's the self-appointed surrogate for God and the Founding Fathers."
is exactly what I've been thinking about the tantrums of the Catholic bishops and cardinals. They hate the thought that they can't control Catholic women. I wish that women of childbearing age (and their spouses, partners) would just boycott Mass until the bishops just STFU.
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