Rick Santorum and the Sexual Revolution

Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum continues to be obsessed with the sex lives of others and seems to want the nation to a time of back alley abortions, gays hidden deeply in the closet and women bare foot and pregnant. It's not exactly a world that most of us want to see return and Santorum seems Hell bent to poison the younger generations toward the GOP. Having been raised Catholic, I am fully aware of just how badly one can be psychologically damaged by the Church. But therapy can help one escape the damage and Santorum's long into adulthood and could have found help if he but wanted to do so. A column in the New York Times looks at Frothy Mix's bizarre sexually obsessed world. Here are some highlights:

Rick Santorum wants to bring sexy back ... to the 1950s, when he was born. That is because Santorum seems to have an unhealthy fixation with, and passionate disdain for, the 1960s and the sexual freedoms that followed.

To fully understand Santorum’s strident rejection of the 1960s, it’s instructive to recall a speech and question-and-answer session he gave in 2008 to a course on religion and politics at the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life in Washington. The speech was interesting, but the answers he gave to the questions that followed were truly illuminating.

In response to a question about the kinds of words he had heard “attached to religion and politics” during his years in the Senate, Santorum ventured off onto sex:

“It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy. And you’re dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s the most central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at.”

“Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom. All of the things are about sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them. They try to somehow or other tie this to the founding fathers’ vision of liberty, which is bizarre. It’s ridiculous. That’s at the core of why you are attacked.”

While explaining what he saw as a shift in the Democratic Party away from “blue-collar working-class folks with traditional values” Santorum said: “What changed was the ’60s. What changed was sex. What changed was the social and cultural issues that have huge amounts of money because if you look — I haven’t seen numbers on this, but I’m sure it’s true — if you go socioeconomic scale, the higher the income, the more socially liberal you are. The more you know you can buy your way out of the problems that sexual libertinism causes you. . . . . And the aim is a secular world. It’s a, in my opinion, a hedonistic, self-focused world that is, in my opinion, anti-American.”

Santorum’s stances are not about our Constitution, but his. He views personal freedoms as a personal affront. His thinking exists in a pre-1960s era of aspirin-between-the-knees contraception and read-between-the-lines sexuality.

The kind of conservatism that Santorum represents has been described as a war on women, but I would rephrase that. It’s a war on sex beyond the confines of traditional marriage and strict heterosexuality in which women, particularly poor ones, and gays, particularly open ones, are likely to suffer the greatest casualties.