#frothy mix

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has canceled his campaign event in Fairview Heights on Saturday.

Santorum was scheduled to be at the Four Points Conference Center at noon for a campaign rally, but has decided to cancel the visit, according to the St. Clair County Republicans' website.

For more information, visit www.stclaircountyrepublicans.com.

By now you've no doubt heard about Republican presidential contender Rick "Frothy Mix" Santorum's avowal that JFK's 1960 speech to the Houston Ministerial Association makes him want to "throw up."  I am a former resident of Pennsylvania and I have a particular hatred for the Frothy Mix.  When I was in high school, he was promoting legislation that would have drained money from public schools for private, home, and charter schooling, and he very prominently decried public schools as "unnatural" environments for kids - seriously, he was and is a fanatic.  I'm still mad that the best I could do in my very first election was vote him out and Bob Casey in, and Casey is not too far below him on my shit list.  (He was one of the three Democrats to vote against tabling the Blunt Amendment.)  Anyway, I think it's worth taking a look at the actual content of the speech.  Nowhere, as Santorum claimed, does President Kennedy claim "people of faith have no role in the public square."  Kennedy's speech is about how he, as a Catholic, will not impose Catholic values upon a pluralist nation, just as he would hope that people of other faiths would not impose their values upon him.  Skip ahead to about 1:20 for one of my favorite lines from this speech. (Emphasis mine)

... It is apparently necessary for me to state once again, not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in: I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic zealot would tell the President, should he be Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote ... and where no man is denied public office mainly because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

That's the rub, right there.  We live in a country with people of many faiths, a country that began as a haven for people of many faiths who were persecuted elsewhere.  We have to find a way to get along here, and that means creating public policy that respects each citizen's right to practice their own religion. Jon Stewart nailed it with "How do you hear 'all faiths are welcome' as 'no faiths are welcome?'"

Rick Santorum seems to be a big fan of imposing his faith on others, so maybe what upset him is the line about how JFK believes in an America "where no religious body seeks to impose its will, directly or indirectly, upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."  Notice that phrasing - general populace. A religious body is welcome to impose its will upon its members, just not everyone.  That this idea would be repulsive to Santorum is both frightening and real.

Then Kennedy continues to say that he believes in an America where "religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."  Boy, that has to really churn up some agita for the ol' Frothy Mix.  I mean, after all, what's this preposterous notion that the Constitution protects all religious institutions equally within the scope of the law?  Oh, yeah, that whole Bill of Rights thing, whereby "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." 

During his first US Senate campaign, Rick Santorum warned voters of a growing menace that was "breeding more criminals" and threatened to destroy America from within: single mothers.

"Most people agree a continuation of the current [welfare] system will be the ruination of this country," Santorum told a town meeting in Clairton, Pa., in February 1994, according to transcripts of the appearance obtained by Mother Jones. "We are seeing it. We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it's falling apart because of single moms."

Santorum, who often trumpets his role in pushing through landmark welfare reform during stump speeches and debates, made the federal program a centerpiece of his 1994 race against incumbent Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Penn.). At his Clairton town hall, Santorum came prepared with a prop—a poster-size chart tracking the increase in the welfare rolls since 1965, alongside the increase in children who were born out of wedlock.

"Open up the current periodicals—study after study, article after article, children having children is destroying the fabric of our country," Santorum said. "If you want to close your eyes to it, if you don't care about it, if you don't want to solve it, if you want to continue the system, to let people stay and spiral—go ahead. Not with me." Single mothers, Santorum argued, needed politicians who weren't afraid of "kicking them in the butt."

It wasn't just a matter of cutting government spending and playing life coach, though. One month later, at an appearance in Erie, Pa., Santorum framed welfare reform as a public safety issue. "What we have is moms raising children in single-parent households simply breeding more criminals," he said. When Santorum wasn't comparing single mothers to animals, he still pressed the issue of out-of-wedlock births and crime. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994 that "we will never solve the crime problem unless we solve the welfare problem. They are deeply intertwined." (Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley did not respond to a request for comment.)

Santorum, who as a second-term congressman described his views as "moderate," made single mothers a focal point of his welfare policy. He introduced legislation that would have required single mothers who had been on welfare for more than two years to work at least 35 hours a week in order to receive benefits. They would also be denied benefits if they could not identify their child's father. "If they don't give the name, they don't get any welfare," Santorum told the Inquirer. Under his plan, which did not pass Congress, unwed teen mothers would not be eligible for welfare at all.

The solution to poverty, crime, and moral decay, he insisted, was to turn off the money spigots. "We have programs right now that pay children to have children," he explained on the CNN'sCrossfire in 1994.

It wasn't just single moms that came under assault from Santorum. He told his audience in Clairton that the welfare program's ballooning costs were also due to "aliens," "drug addicts," and children "who have learning disabilities" as well. Santorum went on to suggest that cases of attention deficit disorder were being faked to bilk the government. "[Y]ou have a lot of testimony indicating that parents are coaching their children to stay in that situation in order to receive benefits," he said.

In an effort to encourage people to get married, Santorum has proposed eliminating head-of-household exemptions for unmarried parents, while tripling their value for married parents. "We shouldn't have incentives for people not to be married," he said in October.

Rick Santorum is a scrotumhead.