Rick Santorum Again Attacks the Separation Of Church And State

With the Wisconsin GOP primary next week, Rick Santorum appears to be pulling out all the stops to rally would be Christianist and Kool-Aid drinker supporters. Why do I say this? Because Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum is again railing against John F. Kennedy's views on the separation of church and state under the U. S. Constitution. As a former daily mass attending Catholic I find the Opus Dei loving Santorum beyond scary. And, as noted before, I cannot help buy wonder what internal self-loathing and psychologically twisted secret issues drive Santorum (e.g., is a closeted gay?). Here are highlights from Huffington Post on his latest attack on the concept of the separation of church and state in American law and policy:

On Friday, as Mitt Romney continued to consolidate establishment support for his presidential candidacy within the Republican Party, getting the endorsement of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc) days ahead of the Wisconsin primary, Rick Santorum soldiered on in a seemingly different quest.

Santorum wrote a 2,400-word essay essentially defending the substance of what he was trying to convey a month ago when he said that former President John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on church and state made him want to "throw up."

[H]is essay on the RealClearReligion website did not pull punches in going after Kennedy. "Kennedy took words written to protect religion from the government and used them to protect the government from religion," Santorum said, referring to the phrase "separation of church and state."

Santorum then compared Kennedy to former Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who in 1923 ushered an era of secularism into the majority Muslim country by helping to establish the Republic of Turkey.

Santorum's decision to write such an essay is as clear a sign as any that even if he does not win the GOP nomination, he wants to use his time as a competitive candidate to shape the public debate. Such an essay holds little political upside, since it will only draw attention to his inflammatory comments in the past about Kennedy.

Santorum should do the country a favor and drop out of the GOP nomination process and check himself into a good psychiatric institution. He needs help in understanding that it's 2012, not 1112.