Reprinted from Greanville Post
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who made an early splash before fading fast in the GOP primaries in 2012, is back for another go. Despite the fact that he is very unlikely to win the GOP Presidential nomination or even the Vice-Presidential offering, he is an important symbol for and of the GOP Religious Right, which is becoming more dangerous with each passing day. There are other direct representatives of it, like Santorum's fellow-Dominionist Mike Huckabee, and those who make deep bows in that direction, like Senator Ted Cruz and Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker. But he is a leader of the pack.
What is Dominionism, you might ask? Oh, just a branch of Christianity that wants to establish a theocracy in the United States, placing "God," as interpreted by its torch-bearers, of course, above the United States Constitution.
At any rate, back in 2012 I published a column (on TGP and several other websites, no longer available on-line) posing 11 questions for the Senator. I thought that it might be useful to re-visit most of those questions, adding a couple of new ones for good measure and upping the total to an even dozen. And by the way, given the Political Duopoly and the thoroughly in-line mainstream media, if you hear any politician or newsperson raising any of them, please do let me know.
1. You put yourself forward as the "candidate of the working man." Do you really think that as such you could get the nomination of the party that is owned (literally) by the rich and the powerful, like your backer (present or former [?]) Foster Friess?
2. You frequently talk about your grandfather, a coal miner. I'm wondering why you never talk about the union he most likely belonged to, the United Mine Workers (UMW). Its President, when it was at the height of its powers in the 1930s and 40s, when your grandfather was presumably working, was John L. Lewis, one of the most militant non-Communist labor leaders in US history. Or is the possible reason that you don't talk about your grandfather's union is that he belonged to the Communist-led rival to the UMW, Progressive Mine Workers?
3. Speaking of Communists, are you aware that members of your family still living in the north of Italy are ardent members the Communist Refoundation Party, the successor to the former Communist Party of Italy?
4. Speaking of ancestors, while you talk frequently about your grandfather, you never seem to mention your parents. Could that be because both your father, a clinical psychologist, and your mother, a nurse, worked for the largest socialized medicine service in the U.S., otherwise known as the Veterans Administration Hospital system? Could that be because you at least formerly vowed to repeal even the modest changes to the world's most expensive health care system that are contained in the Affordable Care Act? You have gone so far as to call the latter "socialized medicine," or worse, when all it does is make some relatively modest changes to the health insurance system. It is a far cry from the coverage and services provided by the government-owned and operated system both your parents worked for. But you don't talk about them.
5. In the past you have referred to the science behind our understanding of global warming and the threats to humanity and indeed many of the Earth's species that it presents as "punk science." You felt that we should continue to rely on fossil fuels and indeed would vastly expand the extraction of same regardless of the pollution of the air, water and ground that such extraction causes. You are also against any government-supported development of alternative fuels and energy sources. Do you still hold to those views?
6. You seem to be bothered by homosexuals and homosexuality to a rather extraordinary degree. In the past you have compared homosexual intercourse to "bestiality," for example, and would outlaw it. (One wonders how such a law would be enforced, but that is another matter.) You have a lot of sweater vests in your closet. Whole bunches of homophobic Republicans come out or are exposed as gay on a regular basis. Is there anything else in your closet we should know about?
7. In referring to the excesses of the French Revolution, you inferred that you believe in the eternal values upheld by the absolute monarchy that it overthrew. Really?
8. On the abortion issue, based on your religious belief about when life begins you are against it and want it to be criminalized, in the process criminalizing the religious/secular belief of those of us who hold that life begins at the time of viability (which criminalization would violate the First Amendment, but that is another matter). Would you be for sending just the abortion providers to prison, or would you also include those women who have them? And if the latter were sent to prison for violating the law, who would care for their children? Of course, since you think that abortion is murder, would you be going for the death sentence, for the providers, for the recipients? How would you go about paying for the massive increase in the size and scope of the criminal justice system that the criminalization of abortion in the way you contemplate it would entail?
9. You have said in the past that you would be in favor of bombing Iran over their supposed nuclear weapons program. Several questions. A) Do you still hold to that position? B) Do you remember the "WMD threat" from Iraq that turned out to be bogus? C) Have you given any thought to the massive loss of civilian life that would be incurred in any US/Israeli bombing raid massive enough to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program, whatever its true objectives? D) How would you explain to our nation the incredible rise in the cost of gasoline that would result from the closing of the Strait of Hormuz which would certainly occur should such raid take place, and the resulting anti-American acts of violence that would invariably take place around the world? E) how would you pay from the vast expansion of war at home and abroad that would follow upon such raids?
10. You have been bombarded with the "contraceptive question." Is your position unchanged since 2012? And if it is, might I note that if you and your wife do still engage in sexual intercourse and she has not been pregnant for a while, either she is past menopause or you two are incredibly lucky at Vatican Roulette, and taking the literal meaning of the term, isn't that a form of contraception?
11. Could you enlighten us as to how Dominionism differs from Sharia Law, which, at its center is built on exactly the same principle: that religious law should be supreme over civil law? And then could you tell us, are you still a Dominionist?
12. If you are not a Dominionist, could you enlighten us as to what you meant when you said:
"... a country that is given rights under the god, under god, not any god, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and that God that gave us rights also gave us a responsibility, and laws, by which our civil laws have to comport with. A higher law. God's law."
Thank you, Reverend, er...I mean "Senator."
