Rick Santorum looks crazier and crazier as time passes, as I figured he would. In his latest blunder, it has come out that he is a man of faith, but not in the God that I worship:
Asked Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” how his faith fits in with his ideas about governing, Santorum said he disagreed with the “absolute separation” between church and state outlined by Kennedy in a 1960 speech.
Santorum said reading the speech made him want to “throw up.”
“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” he said. “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.”
In case you are wondering what John F. Kennedy was talking about, since the quote was paraphrased, this is what he said:
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 parishioners 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.
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum does not worship the God I worship. He claims he does while wearing religion on his sleeve, but in truth he worships the State. His church congregation is the bureaucrat who makes you file for a marriage license and swear an oath of fealty to your spouse before you do so before God. His priests are the police chiefs who tell little girls that their lemonade is dangerous to sell without proper permits and regulations. His bishops are the lobbyists whose corruption has swarmed over Congress to the point where they no longer represent the will of their respective constituents but instead the interests of a few elite.
And he wants to be pope of it all.
The fact of the matter is, Statism takes on many forms and although the most common form is the secular left, it can infect the Christian “conservative” as well as we see with Rick Santorum and his growing support as the latest Not-Romney-Or-Paul candidate. The fact of the matter is, Rick Santorum sees the government as a force to make the world a better place, rather than a force to ensure justice and a nation’s self-preservation. Everything else should be left up to the individual.
Santorum’s own actions demonstrate this as he was a firm supporter of government expansion during his time in Congress. He justifies the use of government to encourage abstinence teachings in education and is even proud of this when it is something that should be left to the parents to teach their own children. After all, the teachers are not directly affected by teenage pregnancies.
A man like Rick Santorum matches the “moral busybodies” that C.S. Lewis described in his famous quote:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
I do not support moral busybodies be they of any religion or of any other philosophy or walk of life. I believe that the individual is sovereign and that for a government to force people to do things against their natural tastes and desires is antithetical to what we are here to be on Earth, even if those things happen to destroy us. Our sin is our sin, not our neighbor’s after all. And while our sin may affect our neighbor in some way, it is our choice and because we have this choice, we are responsible for ourselves. This is something that Santorum absolutely refuses to believe in despite his supposed claims to being a good Christian man.
Unfortunately, I believe that the right-wing of this country is largely in line with Santorum’s view of government. This was more or less confirmed to me when Ron Paul, in one of the numerous previous debates, stated that we should apply the golden rule to our foreign policy (love your neighbor as yourself) and was subsequently met with jeers and boos, probably from men and women who claim the same mantle of Christianity that Santorum does. As it stands, American Casual Christians (who make up 66% of this once great nation) are more inclined to spread the Gospel through bombings and the blood of dead soldiers rather than through missionary work. This is largely because it is more difficult to do the latter and provides them with something material to hope due to their spiritual blindness.
Ultimately Rick Santorum’s God is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God whom Jesus talked so much about in parables and in his own actions here on Earth, but the God created by man in the form of buildings, people, and pointless political jargon. A wiser nation would have been wary of such a man and made him a court jester rather than a leader of any kind. It is a shame that we have become a nation of fools, both in the Biblical sense and in the modern sense as well.