Eklof was a part-time minister at a church in Louisville, Ky., in 2004 when the state voted to amend the state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Eklof responded by announcing that he wouldn’t perform marriages until same sex couples could wed.

“I had really looked at this as a free speech issue as much as a human rights issue,” he told Salon. It was a violation of the “First Amendment guarantee to religious expression...It would be the equivalent of someone coming into my restaurant and saying you can no longer serve blacks.”

Eklof's stance cost him his job as a video producer for the Kentucky Farm Bureau, a lobby representing and supporting agricultural interests. He sued and the Bureau eventually admitted to firing him for his views. The lawsuit settled for an undisclosed sum, “Enough to make my attorneys and Uncle Sam happy,” Eklof said. (The Kentucky church has continued to follow his example and does not “allow weddings of non-members to be held on its premises until it can open its doors equally to all couples, including gays and lesbians.”)

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January: Newt Gingrich

To anyone who’d just been teleported from the year 1999, the scene in Charleston, South Carolina on the night of January 21 had to be impossible to fathom: There was Newt Gingrich, the man who’d been marched off the political stage by his own party after a disastrous four-year run as House Speaker, declaring victory in a Republican presidential primary. And not just any primary: South Carolina, a historically pivotal early contest. And not just a victory – an absolute landslide.

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World Net Daily announced Monday that Sanotrum will join the team as an "exclusive columnist," after he "ignited grass-roots conservatives" during his failed bid in the Republican primary. His columns will be featured every Monday. The conservative website is most well-known  for pounding the birther drum harder (and longer) than anyone, and for occasionally dipping a toe into white nationalism.

In his first column, Santorum continues his opposition to a push by Democrats in Congress to ratify a U.N. treaty to promote equal rights for the disabled. Last week, he called it "a direct assault on us and our family." This week he explains his opposition to the "much darker and more troubling implications" of the treaty on WND:

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The former senator and presidential candidate described the fight against gay marriage in almost existential, not to say desperate, terms. “The movement you are fighting is the most important movement to win,” Santorum told the group, which doesn’t favor abortion either. “This issue will destroy and undermine the church in America more than any other movement,” said Santorum.

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So it's not uncommon to hear a prominant conservative, even one who holds elected office, make patently offensive remarks. Yet some occasionally hit an unimaginable low. This week, it was revealed that Republican Rep. Jon Hubbard has published a book in which he wrote that “[T]he institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise." He defended his book on Wednesday, telling the Jonesboro Sun that he still believed slavery to be a blessing because it helped blacks come to America. Yes, he praised slavery. And when given the opportunity to backpedal, he doubled down.

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"I've voted to kill Big Bird in the past," he told CNN host Piers Morgan. "I have a record there that I have to disclose. That doesn't mean I don’t like Big Bird. I mean, you can kill things and still like them, maybe to eat them, I don’t know."

Yikes. Let's just hope that none of Santorum's seven children were watching.

h/t TPM

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This is illustrated nicely by a speech  former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave this weekend at the Values Voter Summit. Santorum understands that the key emotion that fuels the Republican base is resentment -- and in particular resentment at having their beliefs mocked by the biased Mainstream Media, and the decadent Hollywood blasphemers, and the all smarty-pants professors high up in their ivory towers, etc.:

"We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country.  We will never have the elite smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do.  So our colleges and universities, they’re not going to be on our side."

Santorum is of course being sardonic: He’s not really arguing that intelligence disqualifies people from being political conservatives.  Rather, he’s stoking the resentment of the people who make up the GOP base. He’s doing so while drawing implicitly on two classic anti-intellectual arguments, which have been much favored by conservative intellectuals over the past couple of centuries.

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And in case anyone was in danger of missing the racial subtext, Santorum linked Obama's waiving the work requirement (he didn't) to "his refusal to enforce the immigration law." Welfare recipients and illegal immigrants, oh my! Santorum made sure to scare the white working class with the depredation of those non-white slackers and moochers. It's 1972 all over again.

But Santorum moved beyond "blah" people to claim that all of America is caught up in "a nightmare of dependency, with almost half of Americans receiving government assistance." To get to half, Santorum had to be including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, programs that are overwhelmingly going to white people.

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The "taxpayer funding" part is transparently false -- the Hyde Amendment, named after a congressman reverentially celebrated at the lunch today, prevents almost all federal funding of abortion, and the Obama administration hasn't changed a single thing about that, in the Affordable Care Act or elsewhere. No one else tried to make a similar claim, nor did anyone else seem particularly excited about that act's contraceptive coverage mandate, either -- it was the only time it came up.

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Of course, the scientific facts are far from being on Akin’s side, which should be embarrassing for a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. While it may be true that female ducks have evolved in such a way that they now have a biological anti-pregnancy response to forced sex, human beings most definitely have not. As the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff notes, many scientific studies have proven that the you-only-conceive-if-aroused theory is complete bunk. In fact, one study from 2003 even showed that rape victims may be more likely to get pregnant than individuals on the whole.

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"What do I call winning 11 states? Just the beginning," Santorum says in a video message on the website of the new group, called Patriot Voices. "Because by staying together you and I can amplify our voices and change America. The top of that list, of course, is defeating Barack Obama and taking back the White House. But it's also critical that we help elect conservatives all across this country and monitor every day to make sure they stick to our conservative principles."

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They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)

One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of Romney.

Don't try this at home, folks. It takes a professional politician to pull it off with a straight face.

A sampling of the also-rans' anti-Romney rhetoric when they were candidates and their obligatory niceness after endorsing Romney.

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RICK SANTORUM

The former Pennsylvania senator still doesn't have trouble curbing his enthusiasm for Romney. He waited a month after dropping out of the race to endorse Romney, then emailed his tepid endorsement in the dead of night. He finally got out the E-word in the 13th paragraph of his 16-paragraph statement.

THEN:

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An interesting question, for sure, but, as anyone who works with data knows, the first challenge is to get your hands on the numbers. Fortunately, there’s one source of data that politicians are eager to provide in limitless quantities: their words.

In order to make sense of a mountain of words, I created a tool that analyzes the frequency of word and phrase usage in a body of text. The texts in this case were the transcripts of candidates’ speeches and interviews culled from Project Vote Smart between January and early April, creating a corpus of over 80,000 words (roughly the number of words in a 320-page novel). The tool then identifies phrases of one to six words in length that have been used with a non-trivial frequency. So what does it tell us?

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The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn't matter if you're a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic "Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race," or someone fairly serious and "savvy," like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.

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