Rick Santorum's "Vision" For American Women

The Republican Party’s war on every demographic they train their eye on (women, the elderly, students, gays, the poor) continues daily on both the local and national scales. Tea Party extremists are both emboldened and following the lead of many of their main national voices like Rick Santorum, right-wing Christian idiosyncrist extraordinaire.

Last week’s laughable Washington D.C. "forum" led by House Republican Darrell Issa (all men naturally, as female panelists were specifically excluded) debating, incredibly, the legality of women having access to birth control, should be instructive for all voters who swung right in 2010 and voted these people in, as the misogynist team also banned the recording of the sessions.

Nancy Pelosi then called a Democrat House meeting last Thursday which served as both a counterpoint and hopefully a panacea for Issa’s "Women Hater’s Club" earlier version, as speaker Sandra Fluke, the witness Issa prevented from attending, was first and foremost. And no, THESE hearings results weren’t secreted from Americans, although California Republican Dan Lundgren successfully prevented the conference, including Fluke’s testimony, from being broadcast live.

Just the fact that the conservative movement in America has successfully made an issue of such a basic right in the year 2012 shows both the usual medieval ideology inherent in their clueless agenda as well as the bald fact that these people have no desire to effect any of the middle-class improvements that President Barack Obama has been pushing for three years.

They prefer instead to concentrate on as many conservative social changes (curtailing student voting, anti-homosexual legislation, ending safety nets while enriching the wealthy, etc.) as they have time for. The GOP modus operandi has been demonstrated by Republican congressional voting over the past three years stonewalling virtually all legislation dealing with job creation and then blaming Obama for the slow comeback.

You really have to get a kick out of throwbacks (as in 2,500 years) like Santorum, as well as wonder about the voters in all the states who have awarded him his early primary victories. This is a man who is inflexibly anti-abortion in all circumstances, even in the instance of rape and incest.

As he has stated more than once that even a baby born out of rape is a "blessing from God" one has to admire his consistency, even as you wonder how the poor woman’s boyfriend or husband might feel about that opinion. He is also against the right to procure and use contraceptives, the very medications and devices that ostensibly prevent the need for abortion in the first place.

Even routine prenatal care should also not be required in women’s healthcare packages in Santorum’s bigoted world, as he believes that it "leads to abortions." Wonder if Santorum’s health views extend to testicular and psa prostate testing in men? Probably not.

It was a real eye-roller, keeping Santorum’s anti-humana beliefs in mind, to hear him slam Obama’s so-called "phony theology" last week in one of his evangelical diatribes.

Last time I checked, the president wasn’t espousing hurling the female gender back into a terrifying Dark Age of black market medications and clothes hangers. And he also wasn’t threatening to curtail other women’s health programs, re-direct our federal tax dollars for religious "faith-based" organizations’ use (in clear violation of church/state separation), reinforcing the Defense of Marriage Act (ending gay marriage as well as civil unions), banning embryonic stem cell research, and reinstating "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" in our military. And this candidate who is pushing a universal return to almost every adult woman’s nightmare is currently leading or running neck-and-neck in Republican national polls in many states.

Rick Santorum stated several years ago in an interview that "Satan has his sights set on America, and is making progress."

His religious views are his own, just as anyone is free to believe that Mighty Thor’s residence is in his palace in Asgard, somewhere between Venus and Mars. But the fact that a millenniums-behind-the-times "moral" demagogue is even within striking distance of the GOP presidential nomination is a sad commentary on the pit that America’s Republican party has plummeted into.

Whatever happened to ideas like individual freedom and smaller government?