[Cole covered this already, but I’m posting this here anyway because I do what I want and besides, you’re not the bossa me. -ABLxx]

Rick Santorum is such a nutbag that actual bags of nuts see him and are like, “Wha?!”

Today in “Rick Santorum is a nutbag” news, we have Santorum going even further off the religious deep end. Surprise!

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Santorum said that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Baptist Ministers made him want to “throw up,” and that the separation of church and state likewise makes him want to throw up. No seriously. He said that.

Let’s take a look at what JFK said back in 1960 as he made his case that as a Catholic, he would not go off the religious deep-end and unleash some sort of papal theocracy:

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute–where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote–where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference–and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish–where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source–where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials–and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

“For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew–or a Quaker–or a Unitarian–or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you–until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.”

“Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end–where all men and all churches are treated as equal–where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice–where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind–and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.”

“That makes me throw up and it should make every American who is seen from the president, someone who is now trying to tell people of faith that you will do what the government says, we are going to impose our values on you, not that you can’t come to the public square and argue against it, but now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square.”

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country. This is the First Amendment. The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion. That means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square. Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, no, ‘faith is not allowed in the public square. I will keep it separate.’ Go on and read the speech ‘I will have nothing to do with faith. I won’t consult with people of faith.’ It was an absolutist doctrine that was foreign at the time of 1960.”

At the outset, let me say that I have very little idea what the hell Santorum is rambling about. Most of his statement makes not one iota of sense to me. I’m beginning to think Santorum is taking the whole “Soylent Corporations are People” business a bit too far, since he seems to think that “free exercise of religion” is a principle that applies to churches as institutions (and not to citizens who attend those churches), and that any government policy that does not permit the Catholic Church to run roughshod over the rights of Americans — Catholics and non-Catholics alike — constitutes a “war on religion” or the secularization of America.

But I digress.

My point is this: Rick Santorum’s tiny mental Jesus is telling him lies.

Kennedy did not say that “people of faith have no role in the public square,” nor did he say that “faith is not allowed in the public square.” Not even close. Kennedy said that all people and churches should be created equal. That’s it. It’s a simple concept, really — one that Republicans, the self-styled masters of the Constitution, should have grasped by now. Frankly, I can’t even begin to understand what Santorum’s Brain was thinking when it interpreted Kennedy’s speech as some sort of attack on faith and the First Amendment. It is nutbaggery most foul, and I simply do not get it.

I can certainly understand why Santorum’s Brain would want to misinterpret Kennedy’s speech. After all, Santorum very well may be the first Republican Catholic candidate for the presidency, and being the staunch theocratic wackaloon that Santorum is, his brain would necessarily have to rewrite Kennedy’s speech or risk explosion brought on by cognitive dissonance.

Santorum’s view of religion’s role of government is, to put it mildly, warped. Santorum thinks that religion and government go together lox and bagels. He is, of course, wrong. Absolutely 100 percent, in-your-face, spit-on-your-neck wrong. In fact, white dudes from Jefferson on up to Reagan have stated and restated the foundation upon which this country was built, and it isn’t religion (or rock and roll) — it’sseparation of church and state.

Santorum also thinks that President Obama is trying to secularize everyone and everything, all the while kicking Catholics in the rosaries. Santorum is wrong about that, too. And, what’s maddening is that Santorum seeks to do what he claims President Obama is trying to do — impose his values directly on the general populace. Values such as the following:

No, Rick. You are correct that free exercise of religion means bringing people of faith and no faith into the public square. More importantly, however, it means that once in the public square, the people of faith and no faith stand on equal ground. People of a certain faith are not permitted to force the rest of the nation to adhere to a particular set of principles. It’s that last part that you don’t quite understand, and I can only hope to Blog that you will never be able to inflict your America on me.

Kennedy’s America echoes the founders’ version of America:

“That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe–a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.”

“I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so–and neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test–even by indirection–for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it.”

“I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none–who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him–and whose fulfillment of his Presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.”

~snip~

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters–and the church does not speak for me.”

“Whatever issue may come before me as President–on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject–I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.”

Santorum’s America is a bland (or, “blah,” if you will), joyless, orgasm-free hellscape in which Satan lurks around every corner.

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

He was successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.

And you say “what could be the impact of academia falling?” Well, I would have the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders in our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.

And so what we saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being education in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and pride to also go after the Church.

After that, you start destroying the Church and you start destroying academia, the culture is where their next success was and I need not even go into the state of the popular culture today. Whether its sensuality of vanity of the famous in America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners, the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.

The fourth, and this was harder, now I know you’re going to challenge me on this one, but politics and government was the next to fall. You say, ‘you would think they would be the first to fall, as fallible as we are in politics,’ but people in political life get elected by ordinary folks from lots of places all over the country where the foundations of this country are still strong. So while we may certainly have had examples, the body politic held up fairly well up until the last couple of decades, but it is falling too.

ok, for revenge I am going to inflict upon you all three things I have said about santorum on FB. You will note the prominence of one word in particular.

If Rick Santorum doesn’t go away soon I am going to die of disgust. He is the most foul, filthy, psychologically and spiritually warped individual to achieve public prominence in my lifetime.

The trouble is you’ve got the wrong adjective. He’s NOT crazy. Just hideously, obscenely DISGUSTING — all of him, everything, from his disgusting face and the disgusting way his disgusting teeth always show through his disgusting mouth down to the disgusting depths of his filthy, disgusting soul.

Disgusting. Dear God, he is SO disgusting. His face, his hair, his mouth especially. Dis-fucking-usting. I don’t think I’ve ever loathed the sight of any other right wing fucktard as much, and Lord knows I’ve loathed them all.

So: 52 years after John Kennedy (successfully) put to rest one of the more enduring canards of American politics, i.e. that Catholic politicians were, or would be, the tools of the Vatican – Rick Santorum comes along to update the principle: by stating that not only should Catholic politicians be the tools of the Vatican, they basically have to be?

OK, I stopped watching the Sunday morning shlockfests long ago, so somebody tell me what the hell Stephanopoulos was doing or saying while Santorum was spouting all of this assinine bile? Did he just sit there and let him get away with lying through his teeth? (I know..silly me to expect otherwise)

On the one hand, after reading Kennedy’s Houston Address, I was quite impressed with it (I had actually never read the entire thing before) – OTOH, the depressing thing is, that if one reprinted this speech today, and distributed it, as you suggest, how long do you think it would take for it to be viciously attacked by the Religious Right as an intolerable affront to “people of faith” and a scurrilous call for official atheism and anti-religion, if not outright Satanism for America?

If the Obama campaign is as smart as you think they are, perhaps the should use this bit from a Ronald Reagan speech:

We in the United States, above all, must remember that lesson, for we were founded as a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. And so we must remain. Our very unity has been strengthened by our pluralism. We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief.

So Little Ricky Torquemendo is actually flat out saying “Yes. I absolutely will take orders from the Pope. Ya gotta problem with that?”

By the way, speaking of Jeebus, I put a lot of work into this today: http://aynrandhatedjesus.blogspot.com/ What do y’all think. Also too, Jesus would have totally punched Little Ricky Torquemendo in the face IMHO.

ABL, I am with you as to the substance of your opinion here. But you know as a lawyer that the 1st Amendment applies to religious institutions as well as to religious individuals. If the federal government or a state government were to pass a law saying, “The Catholic Church must ordain women to perform its relevant ceremonies,” the Catholic Church as an institution would have standing to sue under the Free Exercise Clause. I don’t see why you had to overcompensate there.

@David Koch: 50 states? Bold talk. I’d say 43 for the President, 8 for Santorum (Louisiana, Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Alaska, Kentucky, and West Virginia and Arkansas on the bubble). Shoo-in southern states like Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas go to Obama because by southern white male standards, Santorum is a Yankee and a not-very-masculine one and an “eyetalian” — no amount of fakey-NASCAR fandom and calling people snobs will get those boys up and out to vote for Rick Santorum. And because the african american and hispanic vote will turn out for Obama big time.

That is, if republicans haven’t put the fix in with voter access laws…

Good god (if you will) the man is a cretin. Surely Kennedy’s point was that faith (Catholic in his case) shouldn’t be a reason for excluding someone from the public square! It would be unfair to call Sanctorum a fascist or nazi on the Italian or German model, but–history buffs help me out here–I wonder if one could call him a Falangist on the Spanish model. If someone had asked me when I was younger whether a politician whose ideal was Franco would have a shot at the Republican nomination, and beyond that at becoming president, I’d have thought he was mad.

@efgoldman: Amending my comment: You are right South Carolina goes to Santorum. But in Santorum-Obama match, Georgia and Tennessee and Obama’s to lose, and Alabama and MIssissippi are in play. Because Santorum is a long way from the dumbest thing he’ll say all year…

I remember the Kennedy campaign…I was a young teenager living in East Texas then. There was amazing anger and bad feeling about Kennedy’s Catholicism. My mom was Catholic, my dad protestant, and so we kids were raised Catholic. The town we lived in had very few Catholics and our church had a priest who was a “circuit rider”. One of the men in our parish ran a grocery store in one of the even-smaller little towns near by, and his store was trashed with anti-Catholic graffiti written on the front.

RIP my father, an FDR liberal, who exposed the most vitriolic anti-Catholic preacher in that town as having lied about his academic qualifications (he didn’t actually have the DD he claimed) and got him fired from his pulpit. Dad was an agnostic who argued religion at our dinner table several times a week, and really hated organized religion starting with Catholicism, but he wasn’t going to see people incited to violence without doing something about it.

Also, too – the word I try to remember every time I see the smarmy, sanctimonious, self-righteous face of Santoronola, whether it be on television or elsewhere. This man would take us back to the days of the Inquisition and tell us we’d all be better off for it, and that we ought to be grateful to him.

Moreover, from what I recall about his term in the Senate, he has a well-earned reputation for being dumber than your average pile of dogshit.

It would be unfair to call Sanctorum a fascist or nazi on the Italian or German model, but—history buffs help me out here—I wonder if one could call him a Falangist on the Spanish model.

I’d say he’s just a Know-Nothing on the American level, actually. (Granted, the Know-Nothings targeted Catholics because that was then, but now they’re part of the country club, so they get to do that shit too).

Ask Santorum if people of the Muslim faith have a place in the public square, and I’m fairly sure he’ll suddenly start sounding a lot more anti-religious than Kennedy ever did.

This man would take us back to the days of the Inquisition and tell us we’d all be better off for it, and that we ought to be grateful to him.

There’s actually an extremely active Inquisition Denial industry out there, mostly powered by Catholic PR people. Oh, the numbers were overinflated. Oh, the level of badness was exaggerated. Oh, the Scary Others (Prods) were also killing people and it’s not fair that you don’t also bring them up every time you bring up the Inquisition.

My all-time favorite apologist statement I’ve ever heard about it: “No one was ever tortured more than once.” Well hot damn, what a buncha friggin humanitarians.

The irony here being that Kennedy made those kinds of remarks in order to prove that he wasn’t going to turn the country into the wrong kind of theocracy. People weren’t unwilling to vote for a religious president back then, they were only unwilling to vote for the wrong kind.

Speaking from Mississippi, I am here to tell you that you are wrong. If Obama matches his AA vote from 2008 and increases his share of the white vote from 11% in 2008 to 15% this year, he wins Mississippi. I think it’s doable with a Shiite Catholic who openly states that Catholicism is superior to Protestantism. I think it’s nearly a certainty against someone who belongs to a religion that Baptist ministers in this state openly accuse of being Satanic. The fundies may not vote for Obama, but they’ll stay home and pray for the Rapture before they go out and vote for someone of either party who they fear might actually be the Antichrist.

Several students we spoke with say they also knew a secret about Babeu.
It was a secret that Babeau’s older sister said she discovered one day after visiting his home.
Lucy Babeu told the ABC15 Investigators she confronted her brother after finding a student from DeSisto school living with Babeu.
“I said what is this student from Desisto doing here? He says, ‘Lucy, he’s my boyfriend. I love him’.”
Lucy Babeu told us her brother was having a relationship with the male student.
“I said Paul get a hold of yourself here,” said Lucy. “You were his teacher! You were his Executive Director! You can’t do this.”
ABC15 is not identifying the former student. He has not responded to our interview requests.
At the time, he was 17 which is the legal age of consent in Massachusetts.
“He was of age. He would be what we considered a high school senior,” said Nielsen.

The irony here being that Kennedy made those kinds of remarks in order to prove that he wasn’t going to turn the country into the wrong kind of theocracy. People weren’t unwilling to vote for a religious president back then, they were only unwilling to vote for the wrong kind.

This.

Most of the people who freaked out about Kennedy were Protestant evangelicals who’d just spent the previous decade doing things like rewriting the Pledge of Allegiance to include “under God,” making “In God We Trust” the national motto, and generally helping to power the Red Scare inspired religiosity of the era.

They didn’t mind preachers dictating to politicians, they were just terrified of someone else cutting in on what they’d thought was their turf.

Hate to tell this, but Obama has no chance in TN, Ky, MS and all across the deep South with the exception of Florida and NC no matter which Republican runs. Thwy hate Obama that bad.

Mostly right, except I think TN is in play. (Or it might’ve been without their new voter suppression laws.) Memphis, especially, is a Democratic stronghold and even though Harold Ford Jr. is a piece of crap and his relatives are an amazingly motley crew of crooks and goofballs, his family built a formidable GOTV machine which hasn’t yet completely fallen apart.

Just to square the circle, the trick here is that to Santorum religion is explicitly about doing what religious authorities tell you. Obedience to church daddy is not an optional plug-in to religion for him, it’s the whole point of it. What is religion there for at all, if not to make you live the “right” way?

If you tell him that he can’t boss you around and force his religious precepts on you, then to him you really ARE oppressing his freedom of “religion”. It’s not a legal misunderstanding, it’s a religions one – an evil dictatorial Taliban-scale religious misunderstanding.

[…] Rick Santorum’s tiny mental Jesus is telling him lies – Kennedy did not say that “people of faith have no role in the public square,” nor did he say that “faith is not allowed in the public square.” Not even close. Kennedy said that all people and churches should be created equal. That’s it. It’s a simple concept, really—one that Republicans, the self-styled masters of the Constitution, should have grasped by now. Frankly, I can’t even begin to understand what Santorum’s Brain was thinking when it interpreted Kennedy’s speech as some sort of attack on faith and the First Amendment. It is nutbaggery most foul, and I simply do not get it. … […]

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[…] Rick Santorum’s tiny mental Jesus is telling him lies – Kennedy did not say that “people of faith have no role in the public square,” nor did he say that “faith is not allowed in the public square.” Not even close. Kennedy said that all people and churches should be created equal. That’s it. It’s a simple concept, really—one that Republicans, the self-styled masters of the Constitution, should have grasped by now. Frankly, I can’t even begin to understand what Santorum’s Brain was thinking when it interpreted Kennedy’s speech as some sort of attack on faith and the First Amendment. It is nutbaggery most foul, and I simply do not get it. … […]

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