Less Opus Dei, Rick, more open your eyes

As Rick Santorum continues his phenomenon in the multiple car pile-up that is the Republican primaries in the USA, that has the rest of the world rubber-necking, he seems very canny to have kept in the race when all looked lost after the initial flurry of eastern seaboard elections.  Of course, he has stuck to his principles and unlike the maverick Newt Gingrich has few skeletons in the closet (rather he takes them out and breaks into a routine of ‘Dem bones’).  This is why the carpet-bombing of negative advertising by the SuperP(olitical)A(ction)C(ommittee)s completely unaffiliated to the Mitt Romney camp have so little impact – whatever Santorum’s public pronouncements, his personal life seems akin to so many down-home Republicans.  Further, blue-collar voters don’t like to see the moneyed, honeyed elite dump on the little guy.  This is why I would like to see him triumph over Romney, so the SuperPACs and negative advertising suffer a significant blow (not just because he would ‘lose 35 states’ in November). If you can withstand the welter of innuendo propagated by gay rights activists outraged at his foul suggestion that bestiality and homosexuality was on a par, you can pretty much weather any storm.  Having ‘Santorum’ have as the top Google hit with a handy description – “Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal [sic] matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum” – would be enough to make anyone feel glad that people thought your surname was Sanitorium. 

As a frontrunner, the scrutiny naturally cranks up because more media types want to interview you.  The smooth Romney camp hopes this is where he trips up. Attacking a Democrat president is meat-and-drink to the Republican grass-roots who, as with Clinton, cannot accept as chief executive and Santorum played to that baying crowd this week to accuse President Barack Obama of ‘phoney theology’.  There are more incendiary interpretations of that phrase but the former Pennsylvania senator believed that Obama was a Christian but he disagreed with his perception of the president placing care for the Earth above care for man.  This is Santorum’s jumbled way of saying that Obama has got mixed up in the Gaia theory and the Roman Catholic right-winger quoted Genesis to say that God gave man dominion over the Earth and all in it (ignoring that Adam and Eve were subsequently evicted from the Garden of Eden).  This puts ‘Dominion ideology’ as the guy-rope that Santorum uses to keep his mast up, allowing him to fill his sails.  Therefore, anything that bounces into the guy is torn in two in Santorum’s mind, hence his rubbishing of climate change research as ‘junk science’. One does not need to study the figures to observe that weather patterns are becoming more extreme, with climatological records falling around the world and the oceans becoming increasingly acidic.

On Wednesday, the Anglican Church made a commitment to tackling climate change, describing potential “runaway global warming” as “the overriding moral question of our times.”  Leaving aside his Opus Dei connections, would Santorum abandon ecumenism and label the Church of England as having ‘phoney theology’?  In his explanation of his Dominion beliefs, Santorum also posited that mankind should be ‘good stewards’ of the Earth.  Exactly.  He may think that the Rapture will happen in his lifetime so trashing the Earth doesn’t really matter but if God didn’t see fit to bring it about when St John the Evangelist was alive, why should He be more obliging to Santorum or ‘St Rick’ (as goes his mocking moniker)?  Our responsibility is to take care of this planet to benefit mankind, not place the Earth above man as Santorum sees all environmentalists.  Unfortunately, vested interests have played a huge role in misleading the masses and Santorum is one of those sheep.