Santorum Shamelessly Uses Kids to Attack Porn

Despite the candidate's rhetoric, his pledge to renew obscenity prosecutions has nothing to do with children.

March 20, 2012  |  

 

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After publishing an anti-pornography pledge on his website last week, Rick Santorum courted questions this weekend about how, exactly, he plans to attack smut. He didn’t make it clear and instead continued to rely on vague rhetoric about the threat to children.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, he said, “Under the Bush administration, pornographers were prosecuted much more rigorously than they are … under the Obama administration.” He added, “My conclusion is they have not put a priority on prosecuting these cases, and in doing so, they are exposing children to a tremendous amount of harm. And that to me says they’re putting the unenforcement of this law and putting children at risk as a result of that.”
If one were prone to uncritical acceptance of political rhetoric, it would be easy to assume from Santorum’s remarks that the Obama administration isn’t prosecuting child porn. In all of his statements about smut, the GOP candidate is always careful to bring it back to the children. Santorum takes no care to clearly define what the threat to children is, exactly – whether it’s that they might be forced into illegal underage porn or that they might happen upon adult material online. The conflation of adult pornographers with child pornographers is a classic anti-smut move, much as child sex trafficking gets uncritically folded into debates about consensual adult sex work.
Let’s be clear here: The Obama administration continues to prosecute child pornography just as the Bush administration did. The real change is in obscenity prosecutions involving consenting adults: As I’ve written about before, the Obama administration hasn’t put a priority on these cases. Three holdover cases from the Bush years have been prosecuted, and to pathetic ends: a plea bargain with no prison time, a dismissal and, most recently, a mistrial. It’s hard to see how those cases – the very best the Department of Justice could find – were a good use of taxpayers’ dollars.
Presumably, hopefully, Santorum understands the distinction between child porn and adult porn, obscenity law and child pornography law, but he’s using ambiguity here to help his case. The truth is that the prosecution of adult obscenity cases — which are nowhere near as legally clear-cut as he suggests — has very little to do with children. If his concern is about kids being able to find adult material online, he could propose stricter access laws. What he’s really after, though, is making consensual, adult porn to which he morally objects disappear. Children just make for a much better excuse.

Rick Santorum "A liberal can't be a Christian."

Rick Santorum is saying that there's no such thing as a liberal Christian. I wonder what Jesus would say about that. Somehow, it expands my imagination, so I can picture the humble carpenter saying what an asshole Santorum is. And it looks like he's the best the GOP has to offer. Talk about having to choose from the lesser of two evils.
Rob Kall Op Ed News

Iran: Santorum Agrees with Ahmadinejad that Devil Attacks the USA

"Satan has his sights on the United States of America!" Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has declared.

"Satan is 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."

The former senator from Pennsylvania warned in 2008 how politics and government are falling to Satan. ... The White House contender described how Satan is even taking hold of some religions.

"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."

More Pennsylvania Wit - Rick Santorum

Santorum: Obama leading Christians to the ‘guillotine’

By David Edwards
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum warned on Wednesday that President Barack Obama and other liberals are leading people of faith down a path that ends at the guillotine.
During a campaign event in Plano, Texas, the candidate charged Obama had an “overt hostility to faith.”
“When you look and see what the left is trying to do in America today, progressives are trying to shutter faith, privatize it, push it out of the public square, oppress people of faith, strip their charitable deductions away from them, trying to weaken them, churches — trying to say that anyone who believes in the value of Judeo-Christian principles,” Santorum explained.

“As we saw in the Ninth Circuit just this week, that if you believe that [same sex marriage is wrong] — this is what the court said — that if believe that, if believe what’s taught in Genesis, if you believe what’s practiced Biblically and a generation since then you are irrational. The only possible reason you could believe this, according to the Ninth Circuit, is that you are a bigot and that you are a hater.”
He continued: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the the guillotine.”
Santorum admitted that the U.S. was “a long way from that,” but if Obama had his way then “we are headed down that road,” citing the Obama administration’s decision to require nearly all private health insurance policies to cover family planning, including female contraceptives.
“Now is the time for America to rise up and say enough!” the GOP hopeful exclaimed.