I fucking HATE Rick Santorum

Hate is a big word.  It isn’t a word you should just throw around because it gets people interested.  I don’t, honestly, hate a lot of people.  I dislike people.  I don’t enjoy spending time with some people.  You need to be a special kind of jackass for me to hate you.

Rick Santorum is a special kind of jackass.

Look, I know that some of my friends are conservatives and I try to respect their opinions.  I disagree with their opinions on some issues but I don’t think they are bad people.  There are very few areas that are deal breakers for me when it comes to political disagreement.

Even so – Santorum moves beyond “political disagreement” to “jackass.”

A friend recently linked to this article in which Santorum, effectively, stated that he did not believe that anyone died due to a lack of health care.  The friend who posted this article works in the health care industry and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is wrong but that isn’t what makes him an asshole.  What makes him an asshole is that he said this:

 People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to

So someone who has cancer and might be able to survive if they can get the right kind of care won’t die because they don’t have health care.  They will die because they did it wrong .

No, I’m not putting words in his mouth.  The jackass just said that when people die due to a lack of adequate health care, it was their fucking fault.

We all know that there is a problem with health care in this country.  We can disagree (loudly) about how to fix it.

But the argument should never be that people who are dying and don’t have the right coverage deserve what they get.

 It isn’t like people are dressing up really slutty, going out dancing and getting date raped by cancer.

NO – I’m not trying to make light of date rape or suggest anyone deserves to be raped.  I’m pointing out how ridiculous the argument is by making a similarly ridiculous one.

Thing is, this fucker basically said that people are doing exactly that.  They are dying because they asked for it.

Is that the only reason I hate this jackass?*

Hell no.

How about his stance on contraception?  Let’s take a look at the quote machine, Bob:

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.

Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.

the state has a right to [ban contraception], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.

Now, Santorum is not the only candidate who believes contraception is wrong.  There aren’t as many of them now that Bachmann has dropped out but he is not alone.  He is the only one who makes a big fucking deal out of it.

His comments about states’ rights are a big thing for Republicans these days but in the case of contraception being regulated on a state by state basis, he simply shows that he’s a fucking loon who doesn’t give a shit about any sense of morality except his own hideously twisted one.

Let’s explore this idea of individual states being able to make decisions on human rights, shall we?  Let’s assume that Minnesota doesn’t ban contraception because, honestly, why the fuck would you do that?  Let’s further assume that Mississippi bans contraception.

Now let’s look at a hypothetical woman.  I’m going to call her “Pat” because that is my wife’s name and the medical condition “Pat” is going to have is similar to one my wife actually experienced. Point being, I’m not making this shit up.

Now, let’s say that “Pat” has been in a stable heterosexual marriage for the last ten years.  Let us further posit that she has not used contraception for the last ten years but rather her and her husband have practiced the rhythm and pull out methods and they, by some miracle, actually worked (this part isn’t true).

After ten years, Pat and her husband decide they want to have a baby and she gets pregnant.  The pregnancy is really very unpleasant and she spends almost all nine months being fed through a tube because she is no nauseous, she can’t keep solid food down at all.

Let us continue by assuming that she decides to have a second child and while it takes a long time to conceive, she eventually has another child and is just as sick as she was the first time.  At this point, she decides that she is done but she’d still like to have sex with her husband so she uses contraception so she doesn’t get pregnant again (that part isn’t true either – she had her tubes tied).

In our hypothetical “every state can do whatever the fuck it wants” society of Rick Santorum, “Pat” would be just fine in Minnesota.  If she was born in Mississippi, however, she’d either need to move, stop having sex or risk jail by acquiring illegal contraceptives.

Now option B is fine for Santorum because he is a member of the “every sperm is sacred” Catholic Church.  I realize there are Catholics who think that point of view is fucking insane but Santorum is 100% behind it (see the above quotes).

But do we really want to live in a country (yes – the United States is a country – not fifty countries) where your access to birth control is regulated by where you happened to be born?  Santorum’s argument is that if you don’t like something, you can work to get it changed with your vote.

If there aren’t certain rights that we can count on at the national level, however, we will have to constantly deal with this sort of fight on a state level depending on which party is in charge that cycle.  “Pat” could use contraception in Mississippi for four years and then, all of a sudden, she would risk jail or a fine.

Ignore for a moment that his stance is anti-woman and would put all sorts of truck stops out of business because they’d lose a gigantic amount of income from those condom machines in the bathroom, it just doesn’t make any sense.

Now the final reason that I think Rick Santorum is a jackass has to do with the Gay Marriage “debate.”

I put “debate” in quotes because the question of gay marriage to me is a deal breaker.  There is no debate.  There are a bunch of jackasses like Santorum who think that their idea of morality is the only acceptable one and there are the rest of us who realize that only fucking assholes think that way.  Quotes?

Hell yeah:

Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality.

First point – how the fuck does he know?  How about homosexuality in ancient Greece f’rinstance?  No, there probably wasn’t homosexual marriage but what if there was?  He doesn’t know.  He’s just saying something stupid because he’s an asshole.

I’m not even going to get into the “marriage has meant a shit ton of different things throughout history you fucking jackass” argument here.

But let’s take him at his exact words.  He seems to say (and I admit that what he is saying is rambling nonsense that can effectively be interpreted as “fuck gay people”) that monogamous heterosexual marriages are the defined norm (they aren’t) and that if gay people can marry, you will have a “dramatic impact on the quality.”

Ignoring that the final quoted remark makes no sense, I’m going to guess that he means gay marriage would negatively impact society because it has never been allowed before.

Well if it has never been allowed before, Rick, how the fuck would you know how it is going to impact society?

The argument against same-sex marriage is based on lies, misinformation and fear.  People are afraid of what gay marriage will do to them even though they have no evidence that it will do anything at all.  The biblical argument is at best flimsy and at worst dishonest.

What really scares people is that they might have to acknowledge that those two nice young men who live down the street aren’t just roommates.

Santorum feeds that.  He (and a lot of people like him) feed the ignorance and fear and dress it up as a religious question.  What they are doing isn’t just wrong, it is cruel.  Dress it up however you like, Rick, you are still just a jackass.

Santorum is not going to be nominated for President.  His rising star will fall as fast as every other candidate in the Republican field and he will get one more opportunity to spew his ignorance and intolerance at the Republican National Convention.  I won’t be watching.

Because I’d rather watch Michele Bachmann do the same thing.  Because she has those crazy eyes.  They are just hypnotic.

*I apologize for using the word “jackass” so much in this post.  It simply seems like the best word to describe the jackass.  It is, however, horribly unfair to donkeys.