Sunday, April 1, 2012

Santorum and Seneca: Quasi Open Letter to Tony (the PAC man not the actor) Perkins

Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BCE - 65 CE) is famous for his observation: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." Substitute for the word, "rulers," "political candidates" and you come up with Rick Santorum. In an ABC interview, Santorum recently said that he'd come upon a 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy saying that his position on separation of church and state was "absolute." Santorum said that when he read this, "I almost threw up." Trying and failing to explain himself, the candidate later expressed indignation thusly: "The idea that the church can have no involvement in the operation of the state is antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country." Has this guy gone completely bonkers? Who but a crazy evangelical is going to vote for this theocratic nitcompoop?

Translation of Santorum's remarks: The U.S.A. is exceptional not for having been founded on the principles of the Enlightenment, but on those of Christians; moreover, the nation was meant to be governed according to Christian principles. Santorum's less-than-absolute interpretation is antithetical to the founding fathers' intentions: they wrote the Constitution at a time when religious wars and pogroms were in more recent memory. Many were deists, believing in a demiurge who left us to our own devices. The Huckabee-Barton Cabal wants us to believe otherwise. Read the anticlerical remarks of Jefferson and Madison and make up your own mind.

Recently, a story by Joseph L. Conn in the Americans United publication, Church & State, said that "Religious Right forces were quick to come to Santorum's defense." These included the usual suspects. Tony (the PAC man, not the actor) Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, claimed that "what concerns Santorum -- and other religious conservatives -- is Kennedy's insistence that leaders shouldn't base their decisions on faith but on personal conviction. That goes beyond the institutional separation of church and state to something far more menacing: a separation of truth and mortality from the public square. What Kennedy described -- and President Obama now embaraces -- is a society where people don't acknowledge God or His role in informing their consciences."

Oh, boy! If fallacies were farthings, Mr. Perkins would have a sovereign's worth. Can you believe the above-quoted gobbledegook? Take the claim Kennedy based his decisions on personal conviction rather than faith. Duh! Go right ahead, Mr. Perkins, placing your faith on the myth you call God; Mr. Kennedy was a rational, reasonable man, well acquainted with scientific discoveries and their ramifications for how we live and how our lives can be improved. Put a theocratic person like Santorum in the White House and we get more of what George W. Bush gave us almost immediately: curtailing of stem cell research that showed great promise in curing or at least minimizing many life-threatening diseases and conditions.

Then there is this gem: The absolute-plus wall of Obama threatens "a separation of truth and mortality from the public square." Truth? There is no more truth in Mr. Perkins' Bible than in the Koran, the Torah, or almost any holy book or scripture. How can you believe in a book that has talking snakes? If you think snakes can talk, you were home schooled in biology. Your home school biology teacher taught you that fossils are God's trick on the Darwinists. They taught you that the entire cosmos was created by God in six days about 5,000 years ago and that all the animals that ever lived were there with Adam, Eve, and Noah. The flu virus got into the Ark but God spared Noah from something unknown and invisible to the desert warlord tribes. Nomads will believe anything their tribal chief tell them; the genius of Mosheh was that he got his people to fall for that two tablets stuff. He'd been telling them for years not to eat pork. He was going blind and couldn't see the tricky worms.

Santorum supports priestly pedophilia and father-daughter incest, or is he just a cafeteria Christian? The only rants in the N.T. against homosexuality come from the lunatic Saul-Paul of Tarsus, a murderous homophobe with a view of women not a bit more elevated than that of Rush Limbaugh. For the real thing, you gotta check out Leviticus. Shame on Mr. Perkins for not letting his beard grow, for going to church on Sunday instead of synagogue on Saturday, for not checking his daughters' hymens to see if they are not virgins and should therefore be stoned to death, and for a slew of other sins against that old worn-out angry capricious homocidal maniac God of the O.T. Mr. Perkins is perhaps best known as a hate monger for heterosexual-only rights. Yes, he has made the Hate Watch at the site of the Southern Poverty Law Center. You're on the Hate Map, Tony boy! Although he claimed his silly evangelical PAC ran out of money fighting gay marriage in California, he keeps popping up to project his fear of being gay on others in attempts to make them suffer so that he can, vicariously, suffer himself. Tony mostly suffers from a messianic complex. What he really wants is to be nailed to a cross. Someone should oblige. Before he causes another teenager to commit suicide.

By their repeated attempts to install creationism (by one name or another) as an alternative to Darwinism in science classes, Perkins' people have shown a singular contempt for "truth." To put it country simple, neither Santorum nor Perkins would know the truth if it bit them on the probosci. It was at least fun to hear that cross-bearing blonde bimbo Laura Ingraham blabbing about how she didn't want "to hear a presidential candidate throw up in any context." Where was she when a jet-lag disoriented George H. W. Bush threw up on a Chinese banquet table? Santorum might be scarey if he weren't so frightening. That he even draws votes says something tragic about this country.

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