It is a good thing Rick Santorum has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into the White House, because like all his fellow candidates, he has no idea how the United States Constitution works.
According to Santorum, the legalization of gay marriage is the “establishment of religion,” even though what it would, in fact be, is a slap in the face to the idea of the establishment of religion – namely, Santorum’s religion.
It is bad enough that Santorum is trying to play off “gayness” as a religion. What is worse is him thinking that he doesn’t have to abide by the Supreme Court’s ruling because he disagrees with it.
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The fact is – and the way this whole thing is set up – if the Supreme Court says something is constitutional, it is constitutional.
Grade-schoolers know this stuff. Why doesn’t Santorum?
We may not like what the Supreme Court says – the Hobby Lobby ruling being a case in point, or Citizens United – but it’s the law of the land, period. The best we can do in response (short of a new system of government) is a Constitutional Amendment, which changes the Constitution and therefore what the Supreme Court can rule about it.
But Rick Santorum, fresh from entertaining a voter or two in Iowa, told Glenn Beck a bunch of Bartonesque BS – namely that marriage equality will force boys and girls to share locker rooms (Mike Huckabee’s fantasy of showering with teenage girls becoming reality) – before he went on to claim,
This is tantamount to government establishing religion. When the United States government comes in and says this is what you are going to believe, this is how you’re going to practice your faith, this is a new religion. This violates, in my opinion, the Establishment Clause in the Constitution that says that Congress shall make no law with respect to an establishment of religion. If the government goes around and tells churches what they have to believe in and what their doctrine is, that is something that is a violation of the First Amendment.
Far from telling you what to believe, the Supreme Court would be telling you that you DON’T HAVE TO BELIEVE what the Religious Right is selling you. It would be affirming that you have a right to your own beliefs, as opposed to having Rick Santorum’s beliefs stand in for your own.
What Santorum’s claim comes down to is this: “If you don’t believe what I, Rick Santorum believe, you are violating the First Amendment.”
Until Rick Santorum understands the First Amendment, he should stop talking about it. You can read it for yourself. It doesn’t say anything about marriage of any kind. Marriage isn’t religion. To claim marriage is religion is to establish religion by forcing everybody else to accept your definition of marriage.
My fourth grader understands that. But then he’s reading at a 10th to 12th grade level. Based on the available evidence – and assuming Santorum is not just obscenely dishonest – I suspect things are reversed for Santorum.
To listen to him, you would think a Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality would force straight people to marry members of their own sex. They protest so much you almost wonder if that isn’t secretly what they want.
Clearly, we could ignore Santorum simply on the basis of what CNN calls his “empty diner” strategy. When only one voter shows up at your campaign stop, you know you’re not popular.
However, in what passes for a political party on the right these days – but which is actually a religious cult – extremism feeds extremism, and that is the real danger in claims like these.
What one candidate says, another has to at least match, and more often, surpass, in order to keep up with the demands of the feckless multitude. Jesus would have fed them loaves and fishes. Republican candidates feed them extremism.
Rick Santorum, who was pro-choice until he found it expedient to be anti-choice when he ran for office, has apparently found it expedient to be completely stupid, and to be honest, it’s not working out very well for him. Unless his entire goal was to appear to be a buffoon, in which case it has worked out very well indeed.
What is amazing is that Republican candidates can say these things without any response at all from the mainstream media.
Can you imagine what would happen if President Obama announced that he would just ignore anything the Supreme Court ruled with regard the Affordable Care Act because he’s the final arbiter of what is and is not constitutional? Obama, unlike Santorum, at least specializes in Constitutional Law.
And there is precedent, after all, in Gov. Brownback of Kansas threatening to eliminate the Kansas judiciary if they rule against him. And this seems to be what Santorum is hinting at, when he says,
“If they get it wrong and the consequences are what I suspect they will be toward people of faith (those consequences being a bunch of stuff David Barton made up the day before) then this president will fight back.”
Well, Rick, right now you are not even the president of one person in Iowa – she wouldn’t endorse him till she gets all the facts – And that is more than Santorum has bothered to do.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
