Rick Santorum: Outlaw Birth Control - - - Bryan Fischer: Criminalize Homosexuality

With Rick Santorum - a man who I deem certifiably insane and bizarrely obsessed with sexual matters - in a three way near tie and possible win in Iowa, it is crucial that the larger public wake up to just how far Santorum is out of the mainstream. The same goes for his political backers affiliated with the American Family Association ("AFA"), a SPLC registered hate group. I have long maintained that not only do the Christianist want to re-criminalize homosexuality, but they also want to role back time to a period when even married couples were legally barred from using contraception. These people are scary and they have nothing but absolute contempt for the religious freedom of non-Christianists. First, Think Progress looks at Santorum's statements against all contraception and his desire to reverse Griswold v. Connecticut wherein the U. S. Supreme Court first addressed a constitutional right to privacy - a ruling that in many way set the stage for the Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas. Here are highlights:

Rick Santorum reiterated his belief that states should have the right to outlaw contraception during an interview with ABC News yesterday, saying, “The state has a right to do that, 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.”

Santorum has long opposed the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling “that invalidated a Connecticut law banning contraception” and has also pledged to completely defund federal funding for contraception if elected president. As he told CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart in October, “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,”

But an overwhelming majority of Americans — virtually all women (more than 99 percent ) aged 15–44 have used at least one contraceptive method — rely on contraceptives to prevent unintended pregnancies and limit the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. In fact, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that contraceptive services provided at publicly funded clinics helped prevent almost two million unintended pregnancies. Without funding from Medicaid and Title X, “abortions occurring in the United States would be nearly two-thirds higher among women overall and among teens; the number of unintended pregnancies among poor women would nearly double.”

The irony is that if Santorum had his way, the demand for abortions would greatly increase - even as Santorum claims to oppose all abortion. Welcome to the ass backwards world of the Christianists.

Meanwhile, AFA's loudmouth hate merchant, Bryan Fischer has made it obvious that he wants gays to be criminally prosecuted for engaging in sexual activity. In making his case that gays are diseased and a health hazard to the country, Fischer engages in a favorite Christianist ploy cherry picking data out of context. He also makes it obvious that in his view, gays are truly sub-human - much as the Nazi propaganda did with Jewish citizens. Here are highlights from Fischer's foul blog:

Homosexual sex ought to be against public policy, simply as a matter of public health. It is behavior which is immoral, unnatural and unhealthy.

You don’t have to take my word for it - just check with the Centers for Disease Control, which tell us that in the history of the AIDS epidemic, 90% of all male victims contracted the disease through having sex with other men (60%), injection drug use (22%) or both (8%). Unrestrained gay sex is a public health menace, just as much a danger to human health as shooting up.

So let’s say we do the sensible thing and make homosexual behavior contrary to public policy, as it was in every state in the union until 1962 and in 49 states until 1972.

Bottom line, this is where we ought to start: let’s impose fines on any homosexual who has unprotected sex with another homosexual . . . . conservative estimates are that more than 20% of active homosexuals are carriers of the AIDS virus.