Santorum

Started by Sabby, January 15, 2012, 07:38:28 PM

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Sabby

I may be a little late on this, but I just found out about it and feel like sharing :) It got a laugh out of me, and the article is so one sided and archaic that it's kind of the perfect example of how not to write a news article.

Quote from: Fox NewsWhen Rick Santorum essentially tied in Iowa, he gave his campaign new life. He also guaranteed America would finally learn just how disgusting, vile and despicable the left is in this country. And how major news outlets and one of the most well-known businesses in the world – Google – are complicit in trying to destroy Santorum because he opposes gay marriage.
Santorum is the victim of what Reuters partner The Wrap and many other organizations call a “Google problem.” That’s quite the understatement. He was attacked with a Google bomb from Dan Savage, a gay advocate and sex columnist who hates straight people who don’t agree with him. He also thinks they should be silenced, bullied and blackmailed. That’s exactly how he’s treated Santorum.

Fox News. Fair and Balanced!

Samael

Fox News.
Even in Germany they are considered a joke.
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Trieste

Wah wah wah, those gays are picking on us.

Wah wah wah, how low can the left go.

Wah wah wah hypocrite leftist communist hate speech poor rich white straight guy refusing to give equal rights to gays hitler hitler jews racism hate speech.

It's a little like shooting fish in a barrel at this point.

TheGlyphstone

#3
Just to play a minor devil's advocate, but you are quoting an Opinion page ,not a news article in any way, shape, or form, even implicitly. Criticising an editorial for being biased and partisan is like getting upset because water is wet. This makes said bias no less hilarious and wrong, though - I read that and was looking around for my tinfoil hat out of sheer sympathy.

Zeitgeist

There is no presumption of 'fair' or 'balanced' on an opinion page. That is why they call it an Opinion page, as Glyphstone said.

And like MSNBCs bias isn't obvious? New York Times? Come on. This is an old and tired argument.

Vekseid

Quote from: Zeitgeist on January 17, 2012, 07:12:42 PM
And like MSNBCs bias isn't obvious? New York Times? Come on. This is an old and tired argument.

This is a false equivalence fallacy, and one that you did not choose to dispute when the subject matter was brought up regarding Fox's partisan donations, tolerance of its commentators making partisan donations, and putting Republican candidates and ex-candidates on its payroll. Similarly, no attempts at Orwellian 'language manipulation' have been leaked from the New York Times or MSNBC, unlike Fox. Until similar levels of ethical violations - and they are ethical violations on Fox's part - can be presented, it is perfectly accurate to describe Fox's bias as being completely out of line in comparison with its more honest rivals, and claiming otherwise can perfectly accurately be describes as dishonest until one of two things occurs:

1) Fox News reforms itself.
2) Other 'news' agencies stoop to Fox's level.

It's also extraneous to your point. I'm not really sure what the point of this thread is, either.

Callie Del Noire

#6
Hate to say it Z, but Fox is the worse offender on the 'spin control' axis of Major News these days.  Of course when you consider that Rupert Murdoch owns them it's not unexpected.

To Murdoch 'ethical reporting' happens to other people.

TheGlyphstone

Quote from: Vekseid on January 17, 2012, 08:20:17 PM
This is a false equivalence fallacy, and one that you did not choose to dispute when the subject matter was brought up regarding Fox's partisan donations, tolerance of its commentators making partisan donations, and putting Republican candidates and ex-candidates on its payroll. Similarly, no attempts at Orwellian 'language manipulation' have been leaked from the New York Times or MSNBC, unlike Fox. Until similar levels of ethical violations - and they are ethical violations on Fox's part - can be presented, it is perfectly accurate to describe Fox's bias as being completely out of line in comparison with its more honest rivals, and claiming otherwise can perfectly accurately be describes as dishonest until one of two things occurs:

1) Fox News reforms itself.
2) Other 'news' agencies stoop to Fox's level.

It's also extraneous to your point. I'm not really sure what the point of this thread is, either.

I think it's just another Fox-bashing thread, with a humorous and conspiracy-theorist bent. I enjoyed the entertainment value of the article, at least, as long as I don't think too hard about the writer being serious.

gaggedLouise

#8
Sex, gays and red tape

This piece (linked) takes a closer look at Santorum's 2003 remarks about gay/lesbian marriage, "true marriage" and sex with animals, remarks that seem to get misreported sometimes even by those who are justly against his positions. No, they are not more palatable, in their interview context they are even worse than they're often credited with. Santorum was hinting, or half-weaseling, back then, that gay sex/gay relations are not "a bit less evil or pervy" than bestiality but just as evil, or near as evil. And moreover, that LGBT sex acts should be a crime in themselves, overriding any right to privacy, even at home.

Quote from 2003 AP interview with Rick Santorum (in another place in the interview, also quoted by Reason in the piece I linked to at the start, he makes the explicit equation, or near-equation, of gay sex, pedophilia and sexual acts with animals):

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution; this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family....

The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire.


The consequences being basically that fewer children are born, because gay couples supposedly do not produce or raise kids, that the idea of homosexuality gets propagated as a hip or desirable thing and that the proper roles of men and women get washed out and perverted. And the points he states, if they were to guide actual law, would also have dire consequences for teenage sex, like, to consensual relationships where the parties straddle the 15-year mark but are happy exploring love, sex and sensuality. By the way, shouldn't "seduction into thinking gayness is okay" be a crime too? Get Al Corley and Rufus Wainwright to jail asap!

(I recall a case in Carolina, NC or SC, where a guy was sentenced to several (ten?) years in jail without any possibility of pardon after his younger girlfriend, who was 14, had willingly given him fellatio at a new year's party: the sentence wasn't changed even after the law in question was overturned, and the case had to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to determine that it was an implausible and grossly oversized punishment enshrined in a questionable law´. By then, the boy had spent a number of years in jail. Excuse my suspicion that he was black and the girl white...).

Well, Santorum isn't actively defending these positions he outlined back in 2003 at the moment - he knows this kind of hard straight line would kill his chances of ever getting close to winning the election, perhaps even to get nominated. But they seem to really tie in with his perspective on sex and human relations. Gives a cue of what policies might be enacted - on or under the table - by a President Santorum.

Good girl but bad  -- Proud sister of the amazing, blackberry-sweet Violet Girl

Sometimes bound and cuntrolled, sometimes free and easy 

"I'm a pretty good cook, I'm sitting on my groceries.
Come up to my kitchen, I'll show you my best recipes"

TheGlyphstone

Where in that quote does he mention bestiality?

gaggedLouise

#10
Quote from: TheGlyphstone on February 12, 2012, 08:18:31 AM
Where in that quote does he mention bestiality?

In another key statement of the interview he says

Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.


That passage is quoted by the article at Reason I was linking to; neither I nor Reason could quote the entire interview, no big deal. But that bit makes it plain that Santorum is slinging together homosexuality, polygamy, paedophilia and bestiality as morally and socially equivalent - or almost equivalent, still completely off the map for any sane society.

The reference of "it" in the last lines "It's not, you know, man on child (---) It is one thing." looks a bit ambiguous, or there could be several references. Some people have taken it to refer to homosexuality, so the sense would be "homosexuality isn't as bad as man-on-child, man-on-cat or whatever /but still disruptive to society/". The writer in Reason thinks it refers to marriage, contrasted against gay sex, pedo sex, bestiality and so on. To me it could also mean, "the crucial thing isn't gay sex, pedo sex or whatever - they are all one thing, one lump of not-to-do things, and they are all disruptive". But whichever way, he clearly links up homosexual relations - and by extension, any LGBT relationships and sexual activities - with paedophilia and sex w/ animals.

/EDIT 18.11 CET: made the connection clearer in my original post/

Good girl but bad  -- Proud sister of the amazing, blackberry-sweet Violet Girl

Sometimes bound and cuntrolled, sometimes free and easy 

"I'm a pretty good cook, I'm sitting on my groceries.
Come up to my kitchen, I'll show you my best recipes"

TheGlyphstone

Yeah, I wasn't disputing that he said it, but an opinion piece examing his equivalence of gays = bestiality should at least include the quote in question rather than quoting an unrelated part of the interview. Now that I've read the piece itself (I missed the link you gave), I can see that was addressed up-front, but not in your excerpt.

Nico

Well, I really would like to have a talk with Mr. Santorum. I've followed him a little via the News and the papers, and... I find myself shaking my head. I am not a very political person, but if a person hates that much, it hurts me.

Callie Del Noire

Quote from: gaggedLouise on February 12, 2012, 05:22:21 AM
(I recall a case in Carolina, NC or SC, where a guy was sentenced to several (ten?) years in jail without any possibility of pardon after his younger girlfriend, who was 14, had willingly given him fellatio at a new year's party: the sentence wasn't changed even after the law in question was overturned, and the case had to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to determine that it was an implausible and grossly oversized punishment enshrined in a questionable law´. By then, the boy had spent a number of years in jail. Excuse my suspicion that he was black and the girl white...).
.

I think you missed the case by a state. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_v._State_of_Georgia

gaggedLouise

Thanks for looking up the case, Callie. Yes, Georgia, but that case, as a 21st century item, really looks like something out of Alice in Wonderland to many of us.

Good girl but bad  -- Proud sister of the amazing, blackberry-sweet Violet Girl

Sometimes bound and cuntrolled, sometimes free and easy 

"I'm a pretty good cook, I'm sitting on my groceries.
Come up to my kitchen, I'll show you my best recipes"

Callie Del Noire

Quote from: gaggedLouise on February 12, 2012, 11:54:44 AM
Thanks for looking up the case, Callie. Yes, Georgia, but that case, as a 21st century item, really looks like something out of Alice in Wonderland to many of us.

This is where I get twitchy about the sex offender registry. You get the sort of stuff that folks do but now with an overzelous DA you're marked for life.  I've had friends, from Georgia, who said 'I did that with my GF/Wife when I was younger.'

I've heard of DA's try and push kids on the list for underage sex (one or both parties, depending on the standing of one parent or another).

It dilutes the Sex Offenders List to do such things.

Back on topic though, Santorum is all about small government except where my (and my SO's) reproductive health, bedroom antics and thoughts are concerned. The more he and his peers talk, the more authoritarian/totalitarian they sound. He scares the crap out of me.

vtboy

Like the justices who decided Griswold and Roe v Wade, I believe the Constitution does protect individual privacy in matters as intimate and as central to our notions of self as sexuality and procreation. In fact, I cannot imagine a civilized society based on any but the most superficial concept of individual liberty which would permit the state to intrude in these areas in the absence of some truly compelling interest (yes, I know there are those who think protection of the fetus is such an interest, but would prefer to leave that issue for another day). That said, I am forced to acknowledge that, as a matter of Constitutional construction, the issue is not free from doubt. Even that staunch defender of individual liberties, William O. Douglas, seemed to acknowledge the tenuousness of the legal foundation of these limited privacy rights when he described them as "penumbral" -- i.e., in the nature of a shadow cast by other rights which explicitly appear in the text of the Constitution.

What I find most interesting about the religious right, however, is not its jurisprudence, but the apparently widespread fear that, in the absence of legal prohibition, the siren calls of homosexuality, incest, bestiality, and god-knows-what else, will prove so overwhelming as to lure masses of men and women in "conventional" heterosexual relationships to abandon their commitments to spouses, partners, and family. While I can't speak for others, I can say that it hasn't been the fear of criminal prosecution that has kept me out of the beds of other men or, for that matter, my dog's ass. 

Makes you wonder what Rick Santorum is really thinking about on nooky night with the wife.

TheGlyphstone

Probably just nookie with his wife. I know it's fashionable to assume all homophobia is simply an expression of deeply repressed homosexual impulses, but his level of zealotry is hard to fake.

Callie Del Noire

#18
Quote from: TheGlyphstone on February 12, 2012, 01:07:09 PM
Probably just nookie with his wife. I know it's fashionable to assume all homophobia is simply an expression of deeply repressed homosexual impulses, but his level of zealotry is hard to fake.

I could care less.. cause.. gee.. he's entitled to his right of privacy. God I hope nothing about it ever comes up. Honestly I don't want to know anything MORE about the jack-ass.

So, please.. world media.. don't go looking. Just.. ignore him please. I'm running low on brain bleach.

Particulary.. nothing more like this..

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087812/Rick-Santorums-wife-Karen-love-affair-abortion-doctor.html

gaggedLouise

This one's for Mr. Santorum and his cronies, peering at other people's lust.

Colonel Abrams - Trapped

Good girl but bad  -- Proud sister of the amazing, blackberry-sweet Violet Girl

Sometimes bound and cuntrolled, sometimes free and easy 

"I'm a pretty good cook, I'm sitting on my groceries.
Come up to my kitchen, I'll show you my best recipes"

OldSchoolGamer

Conservatism!
Getting the big mean repressive government out of our lives.*

* unless it involves subsidizing corporations, war, or stopping buttsechs.  Then more government is good.    C:)

vtboy

Quote from: TheGlyphstone on February 12, 2012, 01:07:09 PM
Probably just nookie with his wife. I know it's fashionable to assume all homophobia is simply an expression of deeply repressed homosexual impulses, but his level of zealotry is hard to fake.

Hard to fake? What about former senator Larry Craig?

I don't make the assumption that all homophobia is an expression of deeply repressed homosexual impulses, and I am hardly a slave to fashion. But, when wing-nuts like Santorum claim that according respect to an individual's decision to use contraceptives or to couple with someone of the same gender will inexorably lead to the destruction of civilization as we know it, I really have to wonder what he or she is afraid of.

And, for the record, I prefer to assume Santorum is fantasizing about the dog.


Lilias

I personally enjoyed the perspective offered in this piece.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI

Callie Del Noire

Quote from: Lilias on February 12, 2012, 04:05:49 PM
I personally enjoyed the perspective offered in this piece.
Sadly being a hypocrit is part of being a 'religious right-winger'.  They are all 'listen to what I say, ignore anything I do to the contrary'.

Sabby