Santorum Says Gay Parents Worse Than Convicts

[galaxygirl]

It's just sick that he's using his daughter to spread lies.

[m0drnmoonlight]

It's just sick that he's using his daughter to spread lies.

He's following the Sarah Palin model!

[notsocommon]

8) HEALTH REFORM WILL KILL MY CHILD: Santorum, who claims that Obamacare motivated him to run for president, told reporters in April that his daughter Bella — who was born with a genetic abnormality — wouldn’t survive in a country with “socialized medicine.†“Children like Bella are not given the treatment that other children are given.â€

10) INSURERS SHOULD DISCRIMINATE AGAINST PEOPLE WITH PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: Santorum sounded like a representative from the health insurance industry when he addressed a small group of high school students in Merrimack, New Hampshire in December. The former Pennsylvania senator not only defended insurers for denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, he also argued that individuals who are sick should pay higher premiums because they cost more money to insure.

Am I the only one who sees the problem with these two statements?

[Witsec7]

Am I the only one who sees the problem with these two statements?

This commentary by Santorum is on the frothy page and attributed to the LA times. It is another contradiction:

“You believe that someone with a healthcare issue should pay the same amount as a healthy person?†he asked.

The nurse replied that she did.

“That’s not how it works,†said Santorum, comparing health insurance to auto insurance. “People with higher risk should pay more. Why should we charge more to people who have done everything right?â€

[FakePigtails]

This commentary by Santorum is on the frothy page and attributed to the LA times. It is another contradiction:

I wish she'd asked what he and his wife MUST have done wrong to have two major medical problems in their family.

[crazyforkate]

I wish she'd asked what he and his wife MUST have done wrong to have two major medical problems in their family.

Yup, and I'm sure that people just take in viruses and grow tumors so they can leech off the system. Or maybe to sin. Either way, this guy's going to put a stop to it.

[lilah]

2) ‘I’M FOR INCOME INEQUALITY’: “They talk about income inequality. I’m for income inequality,†Santorum said during an event in Pella, Iowa in December. “I think some people should make more than other people, because some people work harder and have better ideas and take more risk, and they should be rewarded for it. I have no problem with income inequality.â€

I really don't think anyone is advocating that a CEO and a janitor should be paid the same wage but that the income disparity should not be so monumental. Repealing the BUsh tax cuts would be a good first step

6) WE DON’T NEED FOOD STAMPS BECAUSE OBESITY RATES ARE SO HIGH: Speaking in Le Mars, Iowa in December, Santorum promised to significantly reduce federal funding for food stamps, arguing that the nation’s increasing obesity rates render the program unnecessary.

Uhhhh I don't even know where to begin with this one. So he's basically saying "let them eat cake?!" Obesity in lower income populations tends to be the result that fast food and junk foods are cheaper, easy to access and take less time and effort to access. Decreasing access to foods in supermarkets will result in more obesity not less. And the additional costs associated with an increasingly obese population (added health issues which would tax the medicaid system, which I suppose Santorum will cut too because poor people don't deserve to be healthy because they make poor choices)

7) ABORTION EXCEPTIONS TO PROTECT WOMEN’S HEALTH ARE ‘PHONY’: While discussing his track record as a champion of the partial birth abortion ban in June, Santorum dismissed exceptions other senators wanted to carve out to protect the life and health of mothers, calling such exceptions “phony.†“They wanted a health exception, which of course is a phony exception which would make the ban ineffective,†he said.

This is coming from a man whose own wife had a life threatening illness while pregnant and probably would have died if she had not spontaneously miscarried. I wonder if he'd prefer that she did die so he could prove just how pro life he is./irony

9) UNINSURED AMERICANS SHOULD SPEND LESS ON CELL-PHONE BILLS: During a meeting with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register in August, Santorum said that people who can’t afford health care should stop whining about the high costs of medical treatments and medications and spend less on non essentials. Answering a question about the uninsured, Santorum explained that health care, like a car, is a luxury resource that is rationed by society and recalled the story of a woman who said she was spending $200 a month on life-saving prescriptions. Santorum told her to stop complaining and instead lower her cable and cell phone bills.

Except that in large swaths of America public transportation is either a total joke or nonexistant. I don't suppose Santorum would want to support more public work projects to increase public transportation either.

10) INSURERS SHOULD DISCRIMINATE AGAINST PEOPLE WITH PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: Santorum sounded like a representative from the health insurance industry when he addressed a small group of high school students in Merrimack, New Hampshire in December. The former Pennsylvania senator not only defended insurers for denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, he also argued that individuals who are sick should pay higher premiums because they cost more money to insure

Yeah it's always the patients fault when they get sick. I wonder if Rick blames his one daughter for having genetic problems.

[desertvixen]

This is coming from a man whose own wife had a life threatening illness while pregnant and probably would have died if she had not spontaneously miscarried. I wonder if he'd prefer that she did die so he could prove just how pro life he is./irony

Except I believe they induced labor on a fetus that was pre-viability - she didn't have a natural miscarriage.

[QAF_Rocks]

Ugh, I hate Santorum. :evil:

As the daughter of two lesbian moms, I'm disgusted and offended by the "family values" crowd claiming to want to protect children like me. Note to Rick and his ilk: you're not helping us. You're hurting us by making sure that our families are stigmatized and unprotected.

For the second time in as many days, Rick Santorum waded into the issue of gay marriage, suggesting it was so important for children to have both a father and mother that an imprisoned father was preferable to a same-sex parent.

Citing the work of one anti-poverty expert, Santorum said, "He found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children's lives."

There has never, ever, ever been any evidence that children with two lesbian mothers are disadvantaged by their upbringings. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Growing up in a two-parent lesbian home is not even remotely the same as growing up with a poverty-stricken single mother. Santorum is comparing apples to oranges, and what's worse is that he thinks those studies are proving his point.

Allowing gays to marry and raise children, Santorum said, amounts to "robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to. You may rationalize that that isn't true, but in your own life and in your own heart, you know it's true."

Sorry, Rick, but your fantasy isn't true. In my "own life" and in my "own heart," I know that my family is perfectly fine. I wasn't robbed of anything. I consider myself lucky to have had the parents I did.

As an aside, I'm always slightly amused at the talk of "allowing" gays to raise children. They don't need your permission, Rick. They've been doing it (openly) since the 1970s. You can't stop them, no matter how much you might want to.

[emmiedahl]

Ugh, I hate Santorum. :evil:

As the daughter of two lesbian moms, I'm disgusted and offended by the "family values" crowd claiming to want to protect children like me. Note to Rick and his ilk: you're not helping us. You're hurting us by making sure that our families are stigmatized and unprotected.

The lesbian-headed family I am closest to is probably the most stable, family-oriented household I know. The moms own a house, worked their schedules around each other so there was always a parent at home, send their children to religious private schools and are very religious. They are much stricter than I am as far as clothing and media go. Santorum would be holding them up as an example of the perfect family if only one of them were a man.

I admit, I have a very positive bias toward gay and lesbian families. Most of us get children very easily and don't really need to put a lot of thought into it. Alternatively structured families usually have to work to get their kids and put in some effort, so they are just in a better place for it.

Santorum pisses me off on so many levels.

About the healthcare thing, some health issues are affected by lifestyle, but many are not. Anyone who has been punished by insurance companies for having a random health problem (me!!!) can tell you all about it.

And food stamps, sigh. I am on them. We get $400 a month for a family of seven, is that really so generous? Santorum has obviously never paid at a register with a SNAP card. Believe me, the entire community is policing my food purchases. If you buy chicken breast and fresh vegetables, people are whining that you are such an extravagant shopper with their tax dollars. If you buy a box of cookies for your kid's class party, then you are another person using the system to get junk food. And don't get me started on the RAGE that people express when you use WIC checks for milk and baby food because WIC takes longer to ring up.

[FakePigtails]

About the healthcare thing, some health issues are affected by lifestyle, but many are not. Anyone who has been punished by insurance companies for having a random health problem (me!!!) can tell you all about it.

And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess he wouldn't support more fair ways of bringing in more money from people with harmful lifestyle factors, for example by charging more to smokers, because that would be the government overstepping, forcing people to live a certain way, stealing from smokers, etc.

[Gizmola]

Nothing helpful to add except I've taken it on as just a routine part of my day to Google Santorum and click properly to make sure the frothy truth is always # 1.

I truly think he is an evil person. I'd rather have G W Bush in office; he was just mindnumbingly stupid, not downright and pervasively evil without any sense of humanity.

[CanadianHippie]

And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess he wouldn't support more fair ways of bringing in more money from people with harmful lifestyle factors, for example by charging more to smokers, because that would be the government overstepping, forcing people to live a certain way, stealing from smokers, etc.

You don't have to be conservative or dumb to believe that. If the government wants to punish people for doing something, they can make it illegal.

[Mommy22alyns]

He's a disgusting excuse for a person.

[m0drnmoonlight]

What's this crap about how children raised by two mothers or two fathers will never ever ever be able to have a stable life because of the lack of a role model of the opposite sex? Who's to say a child with two mothers can't have a grandfather, or an uncle, or a cousin, or someone else who's really important in their life? This argument has absolutely no logic, but what do we expect from a moron like him?

Someone in his camp might want to tell the Duggars to back off because they're proof that his "only children raised by a mom and dad can have a loving, stable upbringing!" argument is bullshit.

[Austin]

He's talking about gays and adoption right now on the CNN/ABC news debate. He is such a creep.

[Constance Vigilance]

What is his obsession? The economy's in the toilet, people are working two and three jobs to feed their kids -- what do gay people existing and having human rights have to do with anything?

[Austin]

He was answering a question from Diane Sawyer.

I love it how these guys all say they want to give all decisions back to the states, but that they would all (except for Paul, I don't know) want to legislate that marriage is "between a man and a woman" from the federal level, thereby de-legitimizing all of the current gay marriages. Hypocrites of the highest order.

[loratliff]

I just want to add a happy note to this thread: I watched my gay aunt (who I spent the bulk of my childhood with) marry her partner of 37 years this past Thursday.

I'm sure that spending time with an imprisoned male would have been preferable to my time spent with them (both retired trial attorneys, who now travel the world). That is all—and a big "fuck you" to Mr. Santorum.

[AtroposHeart]

Yes, I know he's fairly controversial, but when he's right about something he hits the nail on the head.

[QAF_Rocks]

He's talking about gays and adoption right now on the CNN/ABC news debate. He is such a creep.

I can't bring myself to watch, but I'm pretty sure I know exactly what he said.

I bet he'd invalidate all the adoptions that have been performed over the last few decades. Some states (like Oklahoma) have tried it. It's scary to realize that if the theocrats really took over, adoptions could be reversed and legal relationships between parents and children would be severed in a heartbeat.

[BravaAmica]

I seriously doubt that we will be saying "president Santorum" any time in the near future.

Many people thought that about Barack Obama. And George W. Bush.

[BravaAmica]

Actually, she chose a risky surgery to try and save her son, while he was in utero. She caught a post-surgical infection. The antibiotics triggered her miscarriage. She knew that if she took the antibiotics, she would miscarry. She took the antibiotics.

I posted a link about this very thing up thread.

[emmiedahl]

I can't bring myself to watch, but I'm pretty sure I know exactly what he said.

I bet he'd invalidate all the adoptions that have been performed over the last few decades. Some states (like Oklahoma) have tried it. It's scary to realize that if the theocrats really took over, adoptions could be reversed and legal relationships between parents and children would be severed in a heartbeat.

Not just legal relationships, either. He would be taking away their mothers and/or fathers. Possibly the most significant trauma that a small child could experience!

[doggie]

Lets all pray he gets caught with his hand or penis in someone elses cookie jar. Or that he pulls a peewee hurman.