Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum speaks during the first New Hampshire Republican presidential debate at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., Monday, June 13, 2011. (AP Photo/Jim Cole) (Credit: AP)
Rick Santorum wants to make use of his Google problem to pull in funds. The presidential hopeful has emailed his supporter list to ask for money, specifically framing his mission as a “fight” against “hate activist” Dan Savage.
“Savage,” Santorum writes, “is the reason my children cannot Google their father’s name.” Presumably, Santorum’s children can Google their father’s name, but if they do, they will likely learn about “the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex,” as well as finding news and information about their father.
Bill Maher, host of “Real Time with Bill Maher” on HBO, is famous for taking shots at true conservatives like me on his show. However this past Friday, he and his guests went too far. Well friends, it’s time we fought back!
On last week’s episode, Maher hosted hate activist Dan Savage. Instead of focusing on the issues and having an intellectual conversation, they broke into vile attacks against me and other conservatives. I refuse to repeat these disgusting, sexually explicit references because these ridiculous attacks are far too inappropriate. However, I wanted to share my interview with Steve Malzberg of WOR in New York City – a responsible radio host who, like you and I, is disgusted by the media’s treatment of conservatives like us.
Imagine if this happened to a liberal. Maher and his friends in the Mainstream Media would hit the roof – and rightly so! But when it happens to a conservative, they applaud and laugh.
Some conservatives in the media like Sean Hannity have lambasted these attacks, but we have to do more! We cannot let such filth stand. Your contribution of any amount right now will help strengthen our campaign to protect us from these outrageous comments and obscene attacks in the future.
Remember this is not the first time Savage has attacked us on our stance of supporting American values. Savage and his perverted sense of humor is the reason why my children cannot Google their father’s name. I took the high road for nearly a decade by not dignifying these mindless attacks, then even defending his 1st Amendment right to spew this filth. And to this day, liberals like Rachel Maddow serve as Savage’s lackeys on national television, pushing his smut.
Yes, he may have the right to belittle and degrade us, but that doesn’t mean we have to sit by and not fight back. That is why I need your support today, and your contribution of $25, $50, $100 or $250 to my campaign will help us do just that!
With your help we will make this country great again. You can help right now by making a small or large contribution to my campaign. Don’t let Dan Savage and the extreme left win.
Thank you for your support.
Fighting For America,
Rick Santorum
P.S. Fighting for America takes all of us – please join the fight today!
Over the course of the GOP primary, observers have seen a lot of sides to Rick Santorum, many of them shocking to even those accustomed to his views on gays, women and religion. But nothing has been as distinctly memorable as the one making the Twitter rounds today: a composite image of the anti-gay candidate created entirely out of gay porn — hundreds of penises, muscular torsos and close-ups of anal sex. There are even tiny people having tiny intercourse in the middle of Rick Santorum’s eyeballs.
Where does it come from? As it turns out, it wasn’t even created by a gay person. A straight couple, Stephen and Vanessa, sent the image to the gay blog Unicorn Booty out of the goodness of their heart. Kevin Farrell, an editor at the site, tells Salon that the couple has “been getting a real kick out of the image garnering so much attention.”
Did you know the GOP doesn’t want to be talking about contraception? That it’s an issue ginned up by opportunistic Democrats? Rush Limbaugh made that case last week (while also insisting Republicans would win an election decided on culture war issues, so I’m not sure what his problem was). But Wednesday it made its way to the Washington Post’s women’s blog, in a piece by Melinda Henneberger headlined: “It’s Democrats who are putting focus on birth control.”
Now, Henneberger is not a Republican. She’s a sorta-liberal, a veteran of the New York Times, Huffington Post, Slate and Politics Daily, who too often gives Republicans the benefit of the doubt, particularly when it comes to reproductive health issues. She emerged as a leading voice criticizing President Obama’s decision to require all employers, even religiously affiliated ones (though not churches) to provide contraception coverage in health insurance policies. You know my stand on that. But her questionable views on the politics of birth control got my attention a few weeks earlier, when she carried water for Rick Santorum and let him whine in an interview that Salon’s Irin Carmon had been unfair to him in her piece “Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control.”
Santorum told Henneberger: “The idea I’m coming after your birth control is absurd. I was making a statement about my moral beliefs, but I won’t impose them on anyone else in this case.” Henneberger sided with him against Carmon. “If that’s the cleanest shot you’ve got, you might want to wait until a better one comes along,” she wrote.
OK, let’s stipulate: Rick Santorum isn’t personally coming for your birth control — in the sense of going into your nightstand and taking out your pills, your condoms or anything else you have there to prevent pregnancy (not even the aspirin that his moneyman Foster Friess would like you to put between your knees, ladies). But Santorum has not only made clear he believes contraception is morally wrong, he has called it “an important public policy issue” in his now infamous conversation with caffeinatedthoughts.com. That’s where he said, “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,” calling it “not okay,” and “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Excuse me if I don’t trust that he’ll keep his benighted views to himself.
Santorum also confirmed to ABC’s Jake Tapper that he opposes the Supreme Court decision in Griswold vs. Connecticut that made state contraception-bans unconstitutional. That’s pretty far out there: Even conservative Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito backed Griswold in their confirmation hearings. But Santorum told Henneberger that he only opposed Griswold because he believed “states have the right to pass even dumb laws,” and he elaborated: “It could have been a law against buying shoestrings; that it was contraception has nothing to do with it.” Um, sure.
Now that Santorum is catching hell for his extremist views on matters of women’s health, he’s turning up the volume on his insistence that he wouldn’t ban birth control. “My position is birth control can and should be available,” he said in Ohio last week. And again, Henneberger is suggesting Democrats are overreaching by portraying the former Pennsylvania senator as an anti-contraception crusader. She quotes Santorum’s “longtime media consultant and friend” John Brabender complaining, “No one is making birth control a topic. It’s not an agenda that anyone’s running on. But it’s a distortion that works to [the other side’s] benefit to imply we’re for limiting access to birth control.”
Henneberger agrees. “When I looked back at a tape of what Republicans have been saying on the topic, what’s striking is how reluctant they are to go there.” She says the “contraception lobby” is firing up outrage to raise money. And again, she defends Santorum and notes that he only wants to defund Planned Parenthood – he’s even voted in the past for Title X family planning funds. (Actually, here’s what he said to Fox: “I support Title X, I guess it is, and have voted for contraception and although I don’t think it works, I think it’s harmful to women, I think it’s harmful to our society.”)
Where to begin?
First of all, Santorum’s website says he will “Repeal Clinton-era Title X family planning regulations, and will direct HHS to restore the separation of Title X family planning from abortion practices and restore a ban on referrals for abortion.” But federal law already prohibits Title X from funding abortion. So I’m not sure what he’s repealing. Santorum is also pushing to make sure Planned Parenthood can’t get Title X funding, which Henneberger implies is no big interference with contraception access. The fact is, 575 Planned Parenthood clinics get those federal family planning funds – in some states and counties, it’s the only agency providing Title X services. So defunding Planned Parenthood because a separate arm of the organization provides abortion services hits Title X, and hard. Santorum’s plan would also keep Title X money out of health centers or hospitals or agencies that perform abortions, even when they’re medically necessary. So, sorry, John Brabender, your candidate is “for limiting access to birth control.” Severely, as Mitt Romney might say.
Santorum also supports various state “personhood” amendments, which would ban many forms of birth control, including the pill, IUD, the ring and the so-called morning after pill, because they can interfere with a fertilized egg implanting in the uterus. It’s true that some personhood proponents say the measures won’t ban the pill, while other personhood backers happily insist they will. The laws are written so broadly that no one knows exactly what they’ll do. That’s why former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, no fan of the “contraception lobby,” opposed his state’s personhood legislation. But Santorum and the entire GOP field support it (Romney, typically, has been unclear about exactly which version he backs).
So honestly, I find it stunning that anyone is arguing that it’s Democrats who are “putting focus” on this issue and then profiting from it, politically or financially. President Obama followed the advice of the Institute of Medicine and required insurers to include no-cost contraception under the Affordable Care Act, because it’s best for women’s health and it also saves money. It was Republicans who politicized the issue, even after the president compromised with Catholic groups and took religious agencies out of the middle of the exchange. House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lined up behind bills to repeal that requirement – Santorum and every GOP presidential candidate support their efforts — even though federal law mandates that insurance plans include all sorts of medical treatment. Democrats didn’t make them single out contraception as a mandated benefit.
Democrats also didn’t tell GOP Rep. Darrell Issa to hold a hearing on the issue – and to leave women off the opening panel entirely. Yes, Emily’s List is raising money on Issa’s blunder, with an ad featuring Rep. Carolyn Maloney asking Issa sternly “Where are the women?” It’s a good ad, but Issa and crew provided the visuals willingly.
Likewise, Democrats didn’t concoct the trend of requiring women seeking legal abortion to be harassed by undergoing an ultrasound first. The news that Virginia’s version of that law would mandate a creepy transvaginal ultrasound shocked the nation – and Wednesday Gov. Bob McDonnell says he won’t sign a bill mandating that forced penetration. That’s progress – and women’s rights groups and Democrats achieved it, by publicizing the Virginia GOP’s overreach.
Are Democrats and women’s groups capitalizing on the political opportunity these backward Republicans are providing? Absolutely, as well they should. But we should be clear: To say, “It’s Democrats who are putting focus on contraception” is a distortion. On “Hardball” today, Henneberger, to her credit, backed away from the language about the “contraception lobby” that she used in her Post piece, and said about Democrats and women’s groups, “it’s no outrage to raise money.” You can watch our conversation here:
OK, it’s true: Rick Santorum didn’t sponsor Virginia legislation to require that women seeking abortion undergo an ultrasound – and in cases of very early pregnancy, when a fetus is hard to see, a creepy and intrusive transvaginal ultrasound. But seven states have already passed ultrasound requirements for women seeking abortion. The Virginia bill is galvanizing opposition nationally at least partly due to the climate of crazy that’s been fomented by Santorum’s backward candidacy.
The man who calls contraception “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be” went from being a failed Pennsylvania senator, Mr. “Man on Dog,” to GOP presidential front-runner over the last month. Now he’s crusading against prenatal testing because he claims it encourages abortion (when in fact most prenatal testing helps women help babies who develop in utero health issues) and claiming President Obama’s policies will ultimately send Christians to the guillotine. (By the way, I apologize for harping on the way Protestants have persecuted Catholics in the U.S., because Santorum reminded me of some of the reason why, with his charge that mainline Protestant churches are a Satan-sponsored “shambles” that are “gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”) He and Mitt Romney, who’s trying to match him outrage for outrage, have been chasing women voters away from the GOP in droves over the last couple of months.
Into that polarizing political climate came the news that Virginia Republicans want to go where no politician of any stripe belongs: up the vaginal canal and into the uteruses of pregnant women who are seeking an abortion. The bill already passed the state Senate, and clearing the House of Delegates seemed a mere formality, especially given that Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas already have ultrasound requirements. A mere formality, that is, until people began paying attention.
Now, for two days straight, the Virginia House of Delegates has postponed its vote on the bill. More than a thousand protesters lined walkways to the state Capitol to silently protest the bill on Monday, and their powerful statement seemed to still resonate on Tuesday. The bill is expected to pass eventually, but with every day, the national backlash against the measure helps its opponents’ chances. On MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” Tuesday Virginia delegate Kaye Kory urged the media to keep paying attention. Gov. Bob McDonnell, who supports the bill, is often mentioned as a GOP vice presidential nominee, and his office has emitted a few warning signs of alarm over the last couple of days. As far right as Republicans have lurched, it can’t be helpful for McDonnell to find his Virginia GOP accused of supporting state-sanctioned rape for forcing unwilling women to submit to vaginal penetration in order to exercise their legal right to an abortion.
Of course, the Virginia GOP still has its fervent defenders. CNN commentator Dana Loesch outdid herself (and that takes a lot) by suggesting that women had implicitly consented to such a procedure when they consented to vaginal penetration during sex. Wait. Let me make sure I’m not misinterpreting her. Here’s what she said: “Progressives are trying to say, that it’s rape and so on and so forth … They had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.” If that sounds like crazy talk – and it is — a Virginia Republican who supports the procedure said much the same thing, telling a Democratic colleague that women had already consented to being “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant,” according to Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. I hope Virginia Republican women will ask their male partners whether they believe consenting to sex represents consenting to state-sponsored vaginal penetration as well. I know, it might be a mood-killer, but it’s a good thing to find out.
As Steve Kornacki observed this morning, Santorum may be compromising his own political future almost as much as he’s compromising women’s rights with his increasingly crackpot declarations. He’s also helping Virginians who oppose their state GOP’s extremism to get attention to their cause, while the Virginia GOP helps national Democrats sound alarms about Santorum’s lunacy. It’s a win-win for proponents of women’s freedom. I keep pinching myself to make sure it’s not a political trick.
I talked about the GOP’s war on women’s rights with Virginia delegate Kaye Kory on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation”:
This article originally appeared on Sarah Fister Gale's Open Salon blog.
Next month, my daughter Ella will turn 11. She’s a beautiful girl, with blond hair and green eyes. She’s an amazing artist, a brilliant writer, and she can do the splits without even warming up.
And if I hadn’t had an amniocentesis, she would have died the day she was born.
Just over 11 years ago, I received a call from my obstetrician’s assistant to let me know that there was an anomaly in my recent blood test. “It’s probably just a testing error,” she assured me.
But when I returned the following week to have the blood test redone, the anomaly showed up again. There was a foreign antibody in my blood stream that shouldn’t have been there. I was six months pregnant, and up to that point my pregnancy had been completely normal.
Rather than turning to my local politician for prenatal advice, I followed the guidance of my obstetrician, who sent me to a perinatologist, who recommended I have an amniocentesis. Because he had a medical degree and years of experience treating pregnant women, I followed his recommendation.
That day, he stuck an alarmingly long needle directly into my growing belly to sample the amniotic fluid around my baby. The results weren’t good. She had Rh negative disease.
Rh negative disease occurs when a mother has a negative blood type and a baby has a positive blood type. My negative blood perceived Ella’s positive blood as a foreign body that it needed to destroy. And that’s what it was doing. Every day, little by little, my body was wiping out every one of her red blood cells.
Before the 1960s, Rh negative disease was responsible for the deaths of thousands of babies whose mothers, like me, had negative blood. They usually carried their babies to term and gave birth to them, only to have them die or suffer extreme brain damage as a result of the anemia and jaundice that occurs with this illness.
In 1968, a drug called RhoGAM was approved by the FDA to prevent this disease, and it has since saved hundreds of thousands of lives. In almost every case when it is administered in time it is effective. But in my case, it wasn’t.
Amniocentesis is the recommended test to diagnose this disease, and it enables doctors to define a course of action to treat and monitor these babies for the best possible medical outcome. Had I not had that amniocentesis I likely would not have discovered that she had this illness. I would have carried her to term, given birth to her, and watched her die in my arms.
Instead, thanks to the amniocentesis, my doctor tracked her progress relentlessly. Every week after that I had another (expensive) prenatal screening test, called a serial ultrasound, through which he was able to monitor the anemia that grew steadily worse as more of her blood cells were destroyed — and track the development of her lungs so that she could be delivered at the best possible moment for her safety. The day he saw that her lungs could function on their own, he delivered her.
Ella was born four weeks premature, a tiny 5-pound bag of bones, with bright yellow hair and eerily orange skin from the jaundice. Within hours of her birth she was given a full blood transfusion – they replaced every single drop of her damaged blood with new blood that would save her life. Then she spent the next five days in the NICU with cotton blinders taped over her eyes and five bilirubin lights shining on her to reduce the jaundice, while my husband and I took turns sitting at her side round the clock, watching her struggle to survive.
For months after she came home, she had to have weekly blood tests to make sure the anemia was in control. They had to draw the blood from her heel because her fingers were too tiny to prick. Finally, at three months her own defenses kicked in and she started producing her own red blood cells.
Happily, she made a full recovery and has no lingering effects from the disease. And it’s all thanks to that one medical test.
If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”
Eleven years ago, my husband and I had two kids and a mortgage, and like most young families we didn’t have $2,000 to pay for a test that my husband’s employer might object to on moral grounds.
So, while Mr. Santorum may think that his blowhard opinions about when and where women should be allowed to have medical tests is righteous, I say it’s ignorance.
In the Catholic church where I was raised, pride, arrogance and an overinflated sense of oneself were considered sins. But in Rick Santorum’s world they are virtues, and they make up the foundation from which he proclaims how other people should live their lives.
When I read stories in the news about countries where women are prevented access to birth control, or the freedom to work, or the right to make choices about their bodies and their lives, I wonder how a leadership with such crazy ideals could ever gain power. But as I look at what’s happening in the debates leading up to this presidential election in our own country, it has become chillingly evident.
As a nation, we are at the precipice of a slippery slope where men in power are arguing about how to take basic rights away from women. I shudder to think what lies at the bottom of that slope, but if Rick Santorum has his way we will all soon find out.
I’ve been saying for a while that I’m not taking the Rick Santorum surge seriously — but on “Now with Alex Wagner” last week, Steve Kornacki predicted the Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado contests would be big for Santorum, and I’ve got to give him credit there.
One part of my Santorum skepticism is I can’t believe even GOP primary voters will nominate a guy who’s running for Pope, not POTUS. His extremism on contraception and his backward views about family life can’t even make sense to Republicans, half of whom supported President Obama’s contraception-coverage mandate in the latest New York Times/CBS poll, v. 44 percent who disapprove.
The other factor in my dismissing Santorum is that I’ve assumed Romney’s money would demolish Santorum the way it did Gingrich. And it may yet. But if Wednesday marked the opening of Romney’s scorched-earth campaign against Santorum, it didn’t scorch anything.
Romney’s anti-Santorum ads are weak tea, compared with his ads against Gingrich. I even went to Rickfacts.com to find the outrages behind the ads. There aren’t any. Maybe Tea Party voters can get exercised over Santorum’s support for earmarks, raising the debt ceiling and other government spending, but I sort of doubt it. The worst thing Romney’s got on him is that he voted to restore the voting rights of certain felons, along with Hillary Clinton, in 2003. That makes me like Santorum a little bit, which I’m sure is a sign it will appall the Tea Party. Still, Clinton isn’t as polarizing as Nancy Pelosi, who relishes her role in bringing Gingrich down with that cozy, couch-sitting climate change ad. Romney’s new barrage makes me wonder if maybe, there isn’t that much material to use trashing Santorum. Or at least not much that Romney can use.
The Obama campaign would have endless material, should Santorum survive the Romney contest. But the former Massachusetts governor can’t attack Santorum’s extremism, because on most social issues he’s gone out and joined him over on the far right. Now, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough says Romney folks are quietly behind several new media revelations about Santorum’s contraception extremism. But Romney can’t blast him in ads when he’s trying to join his side in the culture wars.
On “Hardball” today, former Mike Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman advised Romney to be himself, to run on his record – as a family man, a business man, a governor, and the head of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. But I don’t think it’s that easy. Romney and Santorum both have big, lovely-looking families. That’s a draw. He tried to run on his record as a “job creator” and business maven at Bain Capital, but it turns out he was also a job destroyer and his Bain role is part of what makes him the face of the top 1 percent. Attention to Romney’s business record was actually disastrous for him.
Of course, his record as the Republican governor of a blue state, who paved the way in providing universal health insurance and accommodated Massachusetts liberalism on reproductive health, might really help him in a match with Obama, if he gets there. But he’s abandoned most of the positions that might attract independents and speak to his ability to get beyond the partisan gridlock everyone supposedly hates – a pitch that worked for a first-term senator from Illinois in 2008. Besides, that wouldn’t be much help during the primaries, anyway.
Worst of all, his Michigan roots were supposed to make that state’s primary a cakewalk. But unbelievably – or not – Santorum’s now ahead there, too. Romney bet wrong when he declared in a 2008 New York Times op-ed that the president should let the auto industries go bankrupt, and he’s paying for it now (despite ridiculous attempts to spin what Obama did as somehow derived from his advice.) And in a sentimental ad about his Detroit roots, it turns out Romney is riding in a Chrysler manufactured in Canada. The guy can’t fake authenticity no matter how hard he tries.
So all the former front-runner’s really got is his money to smear his opponents (I’m sorry I used the term “smear Santorum” on television tonight. It won’t happen again.) But his first barrage at Santorum won’t do much damage. In fact, Santorum released a surprisingly funny (normally funny and Santorum don’t mix) ad attacking “Rombo” for his well-funded mudslinging. It’s all in the video, below. I still think Romney is the candidate to beat, given his war chest and Santorum’s spare campaign, but he’s going to ride some tough road in his Canadian-manufactured Chrysler in the weeks to come.
Rick is on a Roll! But Man is not the measure of all things 
Birth Control Made Me 
Why Rick Santorum would have killed my daughter 
Is a Greek debt default still inevitable? 
Birth control: The right’s still winning 
How Viola Davis took Meryl Streep’s Oscar 
Bathrooms: the new transgender battleground 
Our nation of moaners 
A very pornographic Rick Santorum 
The death of chick lit 
The futile search for meaning in “Linsanity” 
Gidra takes on the American war machine 
What can primates feel? 
