02.14.12
Leprosy or Santorum?
It’s an easy choice. Leprosy is treatable. Rick Santorum isn’t. And the incidence of him in this country is a lot greater. Rick Santorum is one of the most singularly repugnant politicians in a group characterized by cavernous personal faults and flaws. Of an unlikable and impossible to admire bunch, Santorum takes the cake.
He’s a Catholic — the worst, someone straight from the church I knew as a very little boy, a mild-looking conservatively dressed sociopath with a pasted-on smile.
It’s virtually inconceivable to me that Republican voters are so nuts they’d actually vote for someone who holds beliefs pitting them against women over birth control and everyone else for having sex for lots of reasons outside procreation.
Santorum is emblematic of the beamish and out-of-touch orthodoxy, the unbending unbeliever-hostile unreason of the Catholic church in the US.
I got married in the Catholic church decades ago and while divorced for a good long time, in the eyes of it I am in that relationship forever.
Fortunately, we still live in the US.
Now for the second part of the story.
As a requirement for getting married in the church in the late Eighties partners had to take a course on marital relationships, administered by the parish in which they were to be joined. This was put in place to battle the merciless statistics on divorce.
Worked good, didn’t it?
Part of the course was on birth control. The church chose one of its local parishioners to teach this subject, feeling he was qualified in some way not apparent to anyone else.
The man counseled the class on the rhythm method, the monitoring of the woman’s temperature and her cycles of secretions. Really, that’s how it was phrased.
The fellow revealed he had five children, or maybe it was six, in the space of about four years and some change. The rhythm method was working very well for him.
It was hard to contain a natural superciliousness.
Of course, the idea wasn’t to teach birth control. It was to get you to have children, a lot of them, and as quickly as possible. Contraception, even the rhythm method, was not OK, to paraphrase and embellish slightly on the wisdom of Rick Santorum.
At one point a priest must have gotten the impression I wasn’t an ideal candidate for Roman Catholic marriage. So he asked me a question he presumably thought could be used to slow things down: “Are you on drugs, George?”
So I got married in the church after saying “No,” anyway. After that I never went to a single Mass. It was the end of having anything to do with the religion.
About a year after having been married a priest from the Allentown diocese showed up at the apartment door wishing to chat. He wanted to know why I had lapsed. I told him I wasn’t going to waste any time on him with an answer and I did it through the intercom security system apartments use to keep out the riffraff.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?” the man asked. It apparently stunned him that someone married by the church could be so rude.
Like the Catholic clergy in Allentown, when I see Rick Santorum I see someone who’s idea of righteousness is getting in everyone else’s business in the name of their own warped code. They are worth only scorn. If you saw Santorum approaching on the sidewalk, you’d cross the street to get away.
People who support Rick Santorum seem from another planet entirely. Either that or they’re so desperate and rendered stupid by a hatred of Mitt Romney they cast their votes for a person worse than an Old Testament disease.
Rick Santorum, part of the real Tough Crowd.