Rick Santorum is a Lousy Creep (Part of an Ongoing Series)

Santorum continues to insist that liberalism is responsible for the epidemic of pedophilia that has plagued the Catholic Church (of which he is a member, btw).

Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, refused yesterday to back off on his earlier statements connecting Boston's ''liberalism" with the Roman Catholic Church pedophile scandal, saying that the city's ''sexual license" and ''sexual freedom" nurtured an environment where sexual abuse would occur.

''The basic liberal attitude in that area . . . has an impact on people's behavior," Santorum said in an interview yesterday at the Capitol.

''If you have a world view that I'm describing [about Boston] . . . that affirms alternative views of sexuality, that can lead to a lot of people taking it the wrong way," Santorum said.

Santorum, a leader among Christian conservatives, was responding to questions about remarks he made three years ago on a website called Catholic Online. In those comments, Santorum said, ''It is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm" of the clergy sexual abuse scandal.

Doesn’t it tell you everything you need to know about the current state of the GOP that this odious buffoon is their third-ranking member in the Senate?

The usual criticisms apply—liberals, even the most diehard advocates for the LGBT community, don’t identify pedophilia as an “alternative view of sexuality.” In spite of the Right’s continual assertions that it is tolerance for homosexuality that leads to pedophilia, bestiality, rape, etc., liberals draw quite a firm line between homosexuality and deviant sexualities—a decidedly easy task that is not, as many conservatives charge, rooted in aesthetics, defined only by what liberals find palatable, rather than having a moral basis. The moral basis is the same as the rest of liberalism—my rights end where yours begin. Homosexuality differs not at all from heterosexuality, in that it involves two consenting adults whose bedroom activities impinge on no one else’s rights; what is absent in deviant sexualities such as pedophilia is the notion of consent, and nothing about liberalism suggests that it would inform such a pathology.

US Representative Barney Frank, a Newton Democrat, called Santorum ''a jerk" and pointed out that the senator tried to use the levers of the federal government to block the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, an act that Santorum likened to ''execution." An autopsy found that Schiavo's brain was half the normal size and that she could not see anything.

''This is one of those people who claims to have had eye contact with a blind woman," Frank said.

And one of those people who insist on associating a tolerance for the GLBT community and a support of their equal rights with permissive toward sexual crimes. Could it be that if anyone is signaling to pedophiles that an acceptance of homosexuality is somehow indicative of an acceptance of pederasty, it’s the conservatives like Santorum who refuse to acknowledge the fundamental differences between the two?