A commenter the other day objected to my characterization of Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's position on birth control. Luckily for us, the good Sentator clarified his position last Thursday:
I vote and have supported birth control because it is not the taking of a human life. But I'm not a believer in birth control, artificial birth control. Again, I think it goes down the line of being able to do whatever you want to do without having the responsibility that comes with that... I don't think it works. I think it's harmful to women, I think it's harmful to our society to have a society that says that sex outside of marriage is something that should be encouraged or tolerated, particularly among the young. I think it has, as we've seen, very very harmful long-term consequences to a society. Birth control to me enables that and I don't think it's a healthy thing for our country.
Video here. Yeah, that's right, no forced pregnancy = harmful to women. For those of you who think this is idle talk, I'll remind you that the president himself has been cagey about whether or not he supports access to birth control, has appointed a wackjob of a guy to the FDA who has held up approval of emergency contreception, and has led a government which has blindly promoted abstinence and scrubbed information about condom effectiveness from its websites, just to name a few. Oh, and these antiBC folks are now urging religious pharmacists to claim their "rights" not to do their jobs if they don't feel like filling women's birth control prescriptions. Anyways, the Senator has been making the rounds, and there's just so much goodness in this interview with George Stephanopolis from this morning that I don't know where to begin. Read or watch the whole thing, it would be really really funny if this guy weren't the number 3 Republican in the Senate. Okay, it's still really funny. In it, he says he would back a constitutional amendment against abortion, and also bashes all those radical feminists who, you know, hate stay at home moms, and then when asked who he's refering to can only come up with
There's lots of â€" no, there's lot's of â€" well, Gloria Steinem. There's one. I mean, there's lots of writings out there... It comes from an elite culture, dictated, again, from academia, dictated, again, from the Hollywood culture and the news media...
All us elites in the academy, teaming up with Hollywood and the all-powerful Gloria again to attack the children! When asked to comment on Frist's latest stem-cell flip-flop, I love how he uses the idea of science trumping politics as a weird sort of save that's really a smear:
I think, you know, Bill's a scientist, he's a physician. You know, I know that that pulls at him a lot in his job. And I think he made the decision that science trumped in this case.
And, oh my God, it's a virtual epidemic of disassembled dissemblers! A few months back, our good President had a little vocabulary mishap, when trying to criticize Amnesty International for criticizing the Administration's human rights record based on the treatment of prisoners:
It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not tell the truth.
Now Sen. Santorum gets in the mix with the opposite confusion of these hard to distinguish words. While discussing the absolutely crucial distiction between Hillary's "a village" and "a community" that it takes to raise a child, he said:
I'd love to have a serious debate. If she'd like to have a serious debate about her view of how society should be ordered and structured â€" I believe her view is one that says government and top-down. I believe my view is the view that's held by most Americans, which means we need strong families and strong communities, and we don't need government really dissembling those institutions, which I think her view of the world does.
Rarely is the question asked, is our politicians speaking English?
