Rick Santorum attempted to justify one of his most bizarre stances in an interview with Piers Morgan on Friday, and the results were predictably scary:
Morgan: Do you really believe, in every case, [abortion] should be totally wrong, [including] cases of rape and incest? You’ve got two daughters… If you had a daughter that came to you who had been raped, and was pregnant, and was begging you to let her have an abortion, would you really be able to look her in the eye and say “No,” as her father?
Santorum: I would do what every father would do, which is to try and counsel you daughter to do the right thing.
[Crosstalk]
Morgan: It’s almost an impossibly hypothetical thing to ask you, but there will be people in that position. And they will share your religious values…
Santorum: It’s not a matter of religious values…
Morgan: …and they’re looking at their daughter saying, “How can I deal with this? Because, if I make her have this baby, it’s going to ruin her life.”
Santorum: Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.
I really don’t like the way Morgan conducted the interview. By asking Santorum to imagine himself as the father of a pregnant rape victim, he may have thought he was putting the candidate in a difficult position. But evangelical men thrive on this line of thinking. I get the sense that Santorum wouldn’t mind being regarded of as a clear-headed Daddy to a nation of hysterical women who might not “do the right thing.” If you want to challenge patriarchal ideas, you don’t do it by framing women’s health issues as father-daughter conversations.
More revealing than Morgan’s inane question were Santorum’s explanations of what kind of God he believes in. For him, God (Sky Daddy, if you will) is responsible for each and every human life, all of which begin at conception. Each of these lives is a gift. When a man rapes a woman, sometimes God decides to give the woman a “broken gift” in the form of a pregnancy, in the hope that this will woman will “make the best of a bad situation” and give birth to the child of her rapist. But what if this imperfect woman starts to think that she might just be better off terminating the pregnancy she didn’t ask for? In that case, it is the job of her father, who is head of his household as Christ is the head of the church (Ephesians 5:23), to “counsel” her so she doesn’t “ruin her life.”
And why is it that the father and head of household gets to makes these determinations even though he never has been and never will be pregnant? That’s easy enough to explain. You see, the first defective woman that God made tricked the first defective man into eating a piece of fruit that would allow him to know things (Genesis 3:4-7) and be less reliant on his heavenly father. And so God punished her, and all the women who came after her, with the pain of childbirth (Genesis 3:16).
I’m fairly certain that Rick Santorum will not be the Republican nominee, let alone the next president. But let’s not forget that more than 150,000 American adults in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have voted for him so far.
(Via ThinkProgress)
