Santorum

[Content Note: This post contains descriptions of bullying and GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum's odious social positions.]


So, here's the thing: Rick Santorum's political ideology is gross and hateful and wrong. His well-known desire to marginalize people in multiple non-privileged classes is frequently justified with outright lies and narrow interpretations of an ancient holy text that even many members of his own religion do not remotely share.

I'm sure his family and friends love him very much, but his policy positions and casually expressed prejudices make him seem like a real fucking asshole, at least from where I'm sitting.

Someone who enjoys enormous amounts of privilege—Santorum identifies as straight, cis, male, white, Christian, and able-bodied; he is married, has children, and is personally wealthy—and endeavors to deny those privileges to other people, who actively works to entrench marginalization on the basis of his own unearned privilege, is a straight-up bully.

Bullies are gross, amirite? Rick Santorum, you're gross. I don't like you.

But, despite the fact that I do not like Rick Santorum, and despite the fact that I find him to be a contemptible bully, I don't believe that he should himself be bullied in return.

And I'm not even interested in any sort of ethical debate about what he "deserves" or doesn't "deserve." It's just that I hate bullying—and meeting bullies with more bullying just entrenches a culture of bullying that normalizes abuse.

If you hate Rick Santorum's antagonistic brand of bullying fuckery, dishing out more of the same ultimately only maintains the culture in which a person of his position and influence can get away with that shit.

Point is: Bullying him back isn't even effective, irrespective of its right- or wrongness.

Which brings me to Dan Savage's "Campaign for 'santorum' neologism," as Wikipedia so delicately describes it.

In 2003, in response to one of Santorum's most famous expressions of despicable homophobia, Dan Savage

asked his readers to coin a definition for "santorum" that would offend the [then-]Senator. He announced the winner as "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." He created a web site to promote this definition, which became a prominent search result for Santorum's name on several web search engines.

...In February 2011, Savage said he would resume his campaign. In a 2011 Funny or Die video, Savage proposed to redefine Santorum's first name if Santorum did not stop criticizing homosexuality. Later, in the August 17, 2011, edition of his Savage Love column, a reader suggested a redefinition in response to the video: "rick (v): to remove santorum orally. ("He was so grateful for the lay that he ricked his partner.") In the column Savage said: "Santorum hasn't laid off the gay bashing, as it's all he's got, so it looks like I'm going to have to go ahead and redefine his first name, too." He gave his apologies to "Rick Dees, Rick Fox, Ricki Lake, and all the other innocent Ricks out there" for the impact of this new definition, and then adopted the suggested redefinition.

Now there are lots and lots of jokes about Santorum that play on Savage's appropriation of his name, most of them thinly-veiled homoerotic innuendo, natch. There have been several of them in comments over the last two days.

This is an impulse I understand. My archives are filled with things that now violate my own commenting policy; it can be pretty embarrassing to live a life of learning in a public way. But the truth is, it's not a good impulse, even if one that intimately resonates.

The truth is, bullying begets bullying. And Dan Savage's campaign to make Santorum's family name synonymous with something "gross" is some real bullying shit.

And then there's this: Dan Savage does not speak for all gay men—and among that diverse community, there are gay men (and their allies) who consider it objectionable, and deeply counterproductive, to treat as "gross" something that is central to gay male sexuality.

(Which is not to suggest that gay men are the only people who have anal sex, or that all gay men have anal sex, but the campaign was designed by a gay man specifically to embarrass Rick Santorum for saying something homophobic about gay men, so the context here is pretty evident.)

Suffice it to say I am unconvinced that responding to a homophobic bully with homophobic bullying is an efficacious strategy to reduce homophobia or bullying.

Your mileage may vary. But the gist is this: It doesn't belong in this space.

Let us all aspire to be better than Rick Santorum here.

Carry on.