"I don't believe in an America where separation of church and state is absolute...To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you makes you throw up." (February 26, "This Week with George Stephanopoulos")
"And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country, the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age?" (August 29, 2008, Ave Maria University)
"One of the things I will talk about, that no President has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea...It's not okay. It's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." (October 19, 2010, Caffeinated Thoughts)
Oh, Rick Santorum says the darndest things!
I only wish he were joking, that we could laugh about his statements and his utter cluelessness, the way we did when Rush Limbaugh criticized the size of the First Lady's derrière (uncalled for, yes, and more than a little hypocritical, but ultimately pretty harmless) or when Sarah Palin emphasized the proximity of her house to Russia—which was funny only when her lack of experience was no longer a threat to the United States.
But somehow, in 2012, women's procreative and personal issues have come on trial again, just as they did when Pope Pius XI wrote the Casti Connubii (or, "of chaste wedlock") in 1930. From 1935 until 1980, contraception in the Irish Free State was illegal, in accordance with Catholic Church doctrine. Now, Rick Santorum and his ilk seem willing to turn the clock back in the United States. It baffles and angers me that we are still having this conversation.
It's only a little farfetched to imagine Santorum's support of a world, à la Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life," in which poor women, singing, "Every Sperm is Sacred," give birth to their 64th children in squalor and abject poverty.
I know I don't want a president—or senator, representative, mayor, or city councilman—who thinks that it is his place to determine my reproductive rights on account of his religion. He has the right to believe whatever he wants, and I have the right to point out that his views are outdated, patriarchal and oppressive.
In a recent hearing on religious liberty and birth control in the United States House of Representatives, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, refused to allow the testimony of a progressive woman in favor of birth control. This particular panel contained no women, and every man represented a conservative religious organization. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) walked out of the meeting because, in her words, it was conducted like "an autocratic regime."
It was John F. Kennedy who so eloquently expounded on the meaning of the First Amendment and its role in government, and whose words make Santorum want to "throw up." Our thirty-fifth president believed that a leader's views on religion are private, and that he (or she) has every right to hold them, but they should not influence the creation or support of legislation. There are progressive religious organization fighting for the rights of the LGBTIQ community and women; religion is not inherently destructive, but when it is used as a tool against the lives and rights of others, it becomes so.
"They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness."
This last quote comes from James Joyce's Father Arnall character in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," warning against earthly temptations and everlasting punishments, but it might as well come from Rick Santorum's Book of Fire and Brimstone. If you want to be a preacher, go to church. If you want to be my president, we need to talk.
Caitlin Hurwit is a member of the Class of 2012.