Rick Santorum and his would be war on Satan, Condoms and College Education will destroy America.

“Rick Santorum and his would be war on Satan, Condoms and College Education will destroy America. “

   There is no single bigger threat to our Nation as we know it than Rick Santorum.  A senator hailing from Pennsylvania who lost his last senatorial race by 22% points he has managed to raise a shocking challenge for the Republican ticket by appealing to evangelical right wing conservatives hesitant to back a big money Mormon.   He has tried to rally popularity from his base by baselessly attacking Barack Obama and fundamental notions of our modern nation such as the separation between Church and State.  From Santorum’s statements that “Satan is attacking America’s great institutions,” that Barack Obama has “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology,” and that colleges are “indoctrination mills, absolutely…that…is a harm to our country” and “I don’t believe in an America where the separation between Church and State is absolute” we see the very real threat Rick Santorum poses to this Great Nation and the from of Republicanism envisioned by George Washington and our founding fathers.

      If God or Jesus could say one thing to Rick Santorum I would imagine it being, “First and foremost, Rick, don’t you dare dirty either my Church or our God by involving them in Politics.  Secondly, don’t you dare undermine my Nation by forcing your narrow-minded religion and worldview upon it.”  At least, that was the argument of my theology teacher at the Catholic high school from which I graduated. The reason being, that when the Catholic Church was the government we saw indulgences sold like government bonds and inquisitions carried out like terrorist renditions causing a pollution of our faith and a corruption of the clergy members charged with representing it.  This is an obvious lesson when you study the history of Christendom and a lesson that rang loud and clear to our enlightened founding fathers. 

       We can listen to Rick Santorum or we can listen to a man of deep religious conviction who helped found our nation.  Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in accordance with the Dansbury Baptists he was addressing that “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies soley between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of Government reach actions only, and not opinion, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. “  While any faithful Christian carries their faith with them everywhere, we have to leave behind our official religion at times of Governance and in public matters because our nation includes a wide range of religious views who all have equal rights under our nation’s constitution, law and our supreme courts interpretation of them.   This is why America works and so many Middle Eastern nations struggle, because we understand the importance of religious tolerance.  We emphasize our shared faith in a higher power while exercising our patriotic duties that begin with a respect for our popularly elected President charged with executing the laws of the democratic majority so long as they do not overstep the bounds of the US Constitution and its protections of individuals.  Rick Santorum clearly misses this, perhaps in some deluded self-aggrandizement of self where he is some heroic servant of God saving us from secular rule.  When I hear him speak of such things I feel as though I am hearing an English translation of some Al-Qaeda or Taliban intercept.   Rick needs to understand that there is a wall between Church and State and I would recommend that perhaps he should stay on the other side of the wall and go get a job as a preacher.

   I understand your struggle with education, Rick Santorum, because anyone with a college education and an IQ smarter than an elephant will see right threw his phony pretence of “faith, family and freedom.”  The only one involved in any level of indoctrination is Rick Santorum.  You see in college, American citizens are provided a framework to think critically and encouraged to challenge the opinions and norms of our societies, our professors, our political leaders and business elites.  There is a scientific process utilized by even the Social Sciences or dare I say liberal arts, which rigorously establishes fact, tests hypothesizes and then formulates larger theories or conclusions based on their findings which are then vetted by a process of criticism by America’s greatest minds.   Maybe his home schooling and one book philosophy from the bible were not enough to prepare him for college and the defeats he faced in the class room damaged his self-esteem and cause him to attack America’s finest assets today.  Such speculation is petty, but what is important is that we understand the value of education.  While our health system, wealth disparity and crime rates pale in comparison to other western nations, our military, economy and higher-education system remain the best in the world.  To keep our economic edge we need to maintain the innovation edge, which is fully dependant on the continued dominance of our universities and easy access to them for the brilliant young minds who desire to fill them.  Understand, what Romney and Santorum both miss, is that while the “liberal arts (history, political science, social science, humanities, literature etc.)” may not turn us into the obedient knob turners and order takers, they certainly do teach us to be great citizens and help us to find scientific approaches to addressing the social ills our nation faces.  A nation of great citizens is something that democracy demands and that our governing corporate plutocracy loathes.    Christianity is something the corporate plutocracy abuses to control our thoughts and guilt trip us into being obedient little sheep.   Liberal arts and the social sciences make us better Christians because they force us to look outside of ourselves, to see and experience things from the perspective of others and through the lens of history so that we can better apply the Golden Rule both as individuals with respect for our fellow citizens and in the policies we support. 

     Rick Santorum makes a baseless personal attack on the religion of Barack Obama, claiming that his policies are not based on the bible and that that he holds some “phony theology, not a theology based on the bible.”  Well, as I separate the subjects of theology (the logic of God) and politics as our nation’s founding fathers did, I have some comments on this.  I myself am an Episcopalian, and since taking the office of President, Barack Obama has frequented Episcopalian services regularly I will claim him as our own and explain the basic differences between my faith, Catholicism and traditional Protestantism.   Protestantism developed as a protest to the corruption of the Catholic Church and so to rid itself of that corruption it rejected Catholic tradition using scripture as the sole tenant of its proponents’ faith.  Catholicism holds reverence for scripture, but also its rich tradition that began with Peter becoming the first Pope.   Episcopalians share the first two tenants of faith but also have a third tenant of their faith, human reason.  We believe that God has endowed us with a gift to be able to establish truth threw human reason and logic.  We are free to use this logic to study both books and the universe to establish our notions of right and wrong, fact and fiction.  The problem with the Bible is that it says strikingly little about either governance or economics.   Does Rick Santorum intend to restore the political oppression of King Herod and the religious oppression of the Pharisees and Sadducees?  Or maybe he wishes to re-establish the economic system of the early Christian church where its members gave 100% of their earnings to the Church which where then doled out by Paul according to the early members’ needs?   The early church’s organization sounds slightly similar to different C-word ism than Christianity.  Understand, that unlike the Koran, the bible says strikingly little about governance, rather gives us a code as to how we should treat one another, as a community of neighbors with differing views and opinions.

     

         In college we learn to look at the entirety of Western Civilization from Ancient Greece to modern America to explore the multitude of different political and economic models utilized to find which works best.  We also compare our political economic system to other nations around the world to see where we can improve and where we have advantages.   This may not be a theology of the bible, but then it is not the president’s job to be a theologian.  We should expect our president to have a conscious recognition that factually the Bible is a neatly selected cannon of stories that tells the historical relationship of the Semetic people with their God from about 1800bc to the immediate years following the death of Jesus in 4bc.  Is it right for someone charged with the duties of president to blindly dismiss the 2016 years since the ascension of Christ, the over 14 billions years of natural history before then, and the 196,932,408 square miles of Earth outside of Israel as we determine what is right for America.  We must also look to “our” past to determine how our nation must be governed in the future and amongst rational intelligent people this past includes more than just the bible, but also define this vast collection of our books and knowledge ranging from history, politics, philosophy, religion, science, medicine, physics to governance.

        The best estimates suggest that 31-35 million human beings are currently living with Aids, yet Rick Santorum attacks condoms as somehow interfering with marriage.  I have a beautiful wife and I challenge the world to find a couple more deeply in love than us.  We have a healthy sex life which is an important part of expressing our love.  We also usually use condoms because my wife has hormonal problems when taking birth control.  We unfortunately are not financially prepared to have a child as she pursues her degree in bilingual education and I myself a masters in homeland security and Phd in Political Science.   The reality is that humans have a genetic instinct to breed, and the actual rates of sexual intercourse are higher than any Rick Santorum would care to admit, with each unprotected sexual encounters carrying the risk of transmitting Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases which can be mitigated almost completely by the usage of a condom.   The statements of Rick Santorum ignore these realities and highlight the fatalist flaw of Rick Santorum and his breed of Conservative thinking.  On the one hand, he claims Christianity is the end all be all of his existence, yet on the other hand he completely fails to take an actual account of the neighbor’s condition he is charged by Christian duty to love.   Rick preaches conformity while ignoring the simple and proven public policies that effectively “do unto others what we would have done unto us.” 

 

    Rick Santorum was right about one thing, “American institutions are under attack.”  Not by Satan as Rick Santorum so boldly prophesized, but by Rick Santorum himself.  He attacks the institution of President, our long established constitutionally defined norms of separation between church and state, our first rate university system, the sanctity of marriage and the wisest of medical advice.  I cannot imagine a Rick Santorum presidency and am confident that while he may win conservative votes in a primary he has no chance of winning a popular election.   Before anyone votes for Rick Santorum I hope you imagine four years of his sermons on your sexual behavior, his faith, his family and how this distortion of freedom would not only undermine our American way of life but also doom us all to poverty.   As the war on terror finishes, do we really need or want a war on Satan, condoms, education and the division between church and state as the focal point of our next four years?  We have spent the last 11 years fighting religious extremism abroad and have made huge advances and should stand together to reject religious extremism in our own governance.   As much respect as I have for all my teachers and the high quality education I received, I remember feeling that their was such an intense level of indoctrination at both my Episcopalian elementary school and the Catholic high school when it came to religion and was certain that certain people simply used God as a means of control and to enforce obedience, not as a genuine faith or belief structure.  I also remember walking back to my dorms from a History 4a (western civilization), with the sun setting in Santa Barbara’s sun and finally truly believing in God and knowing with certainty that this is how things are meant to be.

      God deliver us from Santorum.

This is an older piece I wrote during the primaries.   I'll have new work up soon, but have just started a new job and am incredibly busy.    www.kingtheo.com