Rick Santorum’s - and the GOP's - Religious Fanaticism

Both Maureen Dowd in the New York Times and Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend have great pieces that look at the extremism - or better yet - fanaticism of Rick Santorum. Dowd, in top form, slices and dices Santorum while Pam goes on to look at the growing insanity that seems to be overtaking the Republican Party as a whole - led, of course, by the nutcases that comprise the GOP base. First these excerpts from Maureen Dowd column in which she also gets in some hits against Taliban Bob McDonnell:

Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola. That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah. “Satan has his sights on the United States of America,” the conservative presidential candidate warned in 2008.

Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as he called it four years ago. “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,” . . .

Mullah Rick, who has turned prayer into a career move, told ABC News’s Jake Tapper that he disagreed with the 1965 Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on contraception. And, in October, he insisted that contraception is “not O.K. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Mullah Rick is casting doubt on issues of women’s health and safety that were settled a long time ago. We’re supposed to believe that if he got more power he’d drop his crusade? . . . . He seems to have decided that electoral gold lies in the ruthless exploitation of social and cultural wedge issues. Unlike the Bushes, he has no middle man to pander to prejudices; he turns the knife himself.

In a party always misty for bygone times bristling with ugly inequities, Santorum is successful because he’s not ashamed to admit that he wants to take the country backward.

Virginia’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, touted as a vice-presidential prospect, also wants to drag women back into a cave. This week, public outrage forced the Virginia legislature to pause on its way to passing a creepy bill forcing women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound, which, for early procedures, would require a wand being inserted into the vagina — an invasion that anti-abortion groups hope would shame some women into changing their minds once they saw or heard about traits of the fetus.

As noted, Pam looks at the larger sickness and insanity that plagues the Republican Party. Here are some highlights:

When you blog about the professional anti-LGBT movement, you get used to reading completely batsh*t, sex-obsessed things from Peter LaBarbera, or junk science from hate group leader Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. But in 2012, GOP Clown Car candidate Rick Santorum has ushered in an impressive and visible new era of religious right/junk science/insane statements that suggests the Republican Party either cannot or is unwilling to deal with the basic political realities going on in this nation. It’s not 1900.

I understand this focus on social issues is about distracting low-info voters from the fact that the GOP has done nothing to create jobs; it’s been about bleating the usual mantra of lowering taxes on the wealthy and other crap that helped destroy the economy in the first place. What I was unprepared for was the unbridled desperation of the fundie base to the extent that it’s driving independent voters and especially women to have to go back to arguing about basic matters of contraception, access to the legal right to an abortion, and whether they should even be in the workforce. And the party of anti-government intrusion is MIA.

No one in the GOP, which is loaded with gay Republicans, is willing to say this is ridiculous demonization, in fact, they are letting the Base rile up. If Santorum is the head engineer of the New Republican Crazy Train, he’s got plenty of people in box cars all the way to the caboose.

Take Tanya Ditty, state director for the anti-gay Concerned Women of America of Georgia, who testified yesterday before the subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on House Bill 630 (State Fair Employment Practices Act), which would provide Workplace Protections for LGBT State employees. In her “expert” testimony that surely was seen by the GOP lawmakers, Ditty asked committee members to oppose the bill because she believed it would allow such things as necrophilia, zoophilia and pedophilia.

You might laugh at this and think the woman needs better meds, but how far is she from standard bearer Santorum? After all, the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania is on board with bigoted, barely sane Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, on whether Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen who talks over-the-top discredited birther batsh*t:

[T] hand over the spotlight to Santorum, rather than marginalizing him, shows just how weak the GOP is, and how much fealty it continues to have to fundie dog-whistlers like the Rev. Franklin Graham, who is beyond offensive in insulting the President and the Muslim community with his tasteless bigotry.

Santorum’s bold insistence on publicly defended faith — specifically Judeo-Christian of course — as a legitimate factor in a campaign to serve as President, not Pope is absurd. Personal faith beliefs (or none at all) have no place in our governing, yet this is where the GOP obviously wants to go.

The general public doesn’t want government in their private sexual lives, and the party of alleged small government is silent, allowing the fundamentalists to rule their primary process in a way that is embarrassing. . . . . At this point I’ve only seen the American Taliban influence coddled again and again. I don’t think the GOP can afford to lose the “sheeple” vote, the base of organized churches that get out the vote, do door to door and can be easily manipulated by fear and smear, God and guns, and fear of changes in gender roles or sexuality (without shame).

These two smart women sum up matters well. They both have far more sense and brains that the clearly mentally disturbed Rick Santorum.