Over the past couple of months, I've relished taking the various republican presidential candidates to task over their hypocrisy, fanaticism, and overall repulsiveness. But the one candidate who's so far done the best job of slipping under the radar, is perhaps the candidate most deserving of our disdain and bewilderment. Among the mainstream candidates (i.e. those who've raised enough money to get invited to the major network debates), Rick Santorum is the least likely to win the nomination. He's placed dead last in almost every poll I've heard cited, but it's certainly not for a lack of right wing zealotry. Based on his statements on the campaign trail, Santorum is easily the most ideological, bigoted, nutty, and downright peculiar of the mainstream candidates.
Santorum last made headlines when he was one of only two candidates, along with Michelle Bachmann, who signed a pledge claiming that black children were better off during slavery than during the Obama presidency. Prior to this, he had earned a reputation for being inordinately homophobic. It should be noted that even among a group such as the Republican primary candidates, a group in which membership is predicated on a requisite level of anti-gay bigotry, Santorum stands out. So much so that a prominent gay blogger/activist Dan Savage started a campaign to neologize the name Santorum into something really gay, just to piss him off. Savage created a contest to see who could come up with the best new definition for "Santorum", and the winning submission was, "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex". Now when you google Santorum, the first hit that comes up is a website, which Savage created, that provides the definition along with a small but gratuitous illustration.
It's hard to imagine anyone with views like Santorum's becoming a viable presidential candidate in any other industrialized country. Yet the US produces a harvest-worth of such candidates every election cycle. Apparently there is a significant chunk of the electorate for whom disbelieving evolution and advocating for a ban on consensual gay sex is not a liability, but a badge of honour. Social scientists have proposed various explanations for why religious nutjob-ism thrives so disproportionately in the US when compared with other nations of comparable wealth and demography. One theory is that the pilgrims (or "settler colonists" as I like to call them), were comprised largely of members of fringe religious groups, who fled persecution in Europe. Once in the new world, in the absence of a state church, there was no centralized institution to keep their religious lunacy in check. Furthermore, the absence of a single dominant religion produced a culture of competition in which each church sought to out-crazy the others.
In a sense, the Republican primary race is a microcosm of that history. So far it's a bit of a toss-up as to who is the most right wing of the candidates. But when it comes to crazy, none of the other candidates are on Santorum's level. I became certain of this after I read the story of Santorum's son Gabriel. According to his wife's memoir, she went into labour just 20 weeks into the pregnancy and the child died shortly after birth. From what I understand, it's not uncommon in these situations for the parents to be alone with the dead child and hold it for a short period while at the hospital. Often, parents will also take the body home so they can bury it. However, the Santorums took their deceased child home and introduced it to their other young children as their "little brother". That night they slept with the dead body in their bed before returning it to the hospital the next day.
Now, maybe I'm just being insensitive, but that sounds pretty crazy to me.
