Let's start with the junior senator from Pennsylvania, Republican Rick Santorum. Rick's got the appropriate conservative credentials, but what makes him so special is his unfathomable case of "foot in mouth" disease. In 2003, he gave an interveiw to the Associated Press, comparing homosexuality to bestiality, among other things.
Sex columnist Dan Savage then demonstrated the power of the word by transforming the Senator's surname into a definition for something pretty gross.
However, becoming a synonym for something icky wasn't enough for the Senator. He's been rumored to have Presidential aspirations, so he did something Presidential aspirants often do: he wrote a book, called "It Takes A Family," an obvious dig against Sen. Hillary Clinton's book, "It Takes A Village."
Sen. Santorum's book is long, boring, contradictory, and demonstrates the Senator's unnatural obsession with U2's Bono. Most importantly, the book documents some of the Senator's weirder beliefs, such as that too many women are working outside
the home, (p. 94), public schools are weird, (p. 386), and “The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder is just wrong.” (Pg. 138)
However, the junior Senator from PA saved a special message for the “Brian Lehrer” radio show on August 4, 2005. There, the Senator said, “(T)he point of marriage from a societal point of view is not to affirm the love of two people, and to make people feel good about who they are in their relationship, but in fact the point of marriage is for having children …If we change that, we devalue the institution and we change it, and re-orient it more toward parents, and away from children.”
Technically, Sen. Santorum isn't a Holy Terror. He's one of their minions, and he's not even truly in their thrall from a religous standpoint; the Senator's a Catholic. However, he's been gracious enough to give excellent voice to the Holy Terrors' way of thinking.
He's also good at playing both sides of the fence. While he condemns homosexuality as a general principle, a key member of his staff is an out gay man, and the Senator just signed a sexual orientation non-discrimination pledge.
The full story is here.
Personally, I think the Senator's anti-gay stance minght be overblown, a ploy to appeal to his core constituency. First, he seems astonishingly tolerant of gays on his staff, and second:
Tell me this outfit isn't gay. He belongs on a parade float.
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