Acid-Trip Politics

Rick Santorum

January 4, 2012

Reading this morning about Rick Santorum’s success in the Iowa caucus vote made me wonder whether someone slipped LSD into my coffee. How else to explain a presidential candidate of a major political party doing so well while opposing birth control and advocating that states can make it illegal. Santorum is essentially saying that a man and premenopausal woman should only have sex if they’re willing for the result to be birth of a baby. He’s also saying that it’s all right for government — albeit not the federal government — to play such a life- and society-altering role in our private lives.

Let’s say Santorum gets his way. We as a nation would have many more children when we can least afford them, a lot less sex, and state governments empowered to regulate one of the most intimate aspects of our existence. That would make reality worse than a bad acid trip. And here I thought Republicans wanted government out of our lives.