Despite winning the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses, Rick Santorum managed to get just one percent of the vote in Monday’s contest and reportedly plans to drop out of the presidential race in a speech tonight. According to National Journal, the former Pennsylvania senator had “spent 86 days campaigning in Iowa since the 2014 election, more than any candidate from either party,” as he attempted to rebrand himself as a “blue collar conservative” class warrior. But Santorum couldn’t escape his polarizing image as a Religious Right culture warrior.
Santorum joined his fellow GOP candidates Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee in claiming that the president can simply ignore Supreme Court rulings that he or she doesn’t like, specifically pledging to defy the court on marriage if he were to become president himself.
He personally pledged to commit civil disobedience against gay marriage and end its “promotion” in public schools, urged Kentucky clerk Kim Davis to defy the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, alleged that gay marriage violates the First Amendment and said he would continue to enforce the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act.
Santorum, who believes that “our civil laws have to comport with the higher law,” argued that the gay marriage ruling was illegitimate because it went “against the natural law.” But because people didn’t heed his warnings, the U.S. is turning into a dystopian secular theocracy where Christians face widespread legal and societal persecution if they dare to defend their purported right to discriminate against gay people. Now, Santorum says that everything he once predicted, such as the imminent decriminalization of pedophilia and man-dog sex, has come true.
He also claimed that Roe v. Wade is similarly invalid because it contradicts “nature’s law” and provokes divine judgment, equating the legalization of abortion with the Holocaust and blaming racism in America on Planned Parenthood.
But at least Santorum offered us one of the more interesting moments of the campaign.
Santorum, who has routinely suggested that President Obama is aiding terrorism, faced a question from a South Carolina activist about the president’s plot to nuke the city of Charleston. He naturally responded not by putting her conspiracy theory to rest but by decrying Obama as a “tyrant” bent on destroying America.
