Santorum on Pornography

It's funny--there are people out there who will try and convince me that (contrary to my own experience) the Christian Church is not obsessed with sex.

You'd never know it from this election cycle.

First, there was the uproar over the contraception issue.

Which resulted in Limbaugh's infamous comments over a female law school student who had the nerve to ask to be insured for contraception.

Now Santorum is crusading against pornography.

(Santorum himself, before becoming a long shot presidential candidate, was most famous for his opposition to gay marriage that first made him a darling of the religious right.)

Okay, so Limbaugh isn't the appointed spokesperson of any organized religion. But you can't tell me it's the secularists who are supporting this type of view.

And maybe the religious right doesn't represent the values of all Christians everywhere. But the inescapable conclusion of this election cycle is that they represent a significant number of Christians. And they vote. And they have no qualms about forcing their narrow view of morality onto the public at large.

And yet, when I try and explain to Christians how the Church is obsessed with sex to the point of myopia on all other issues, they look at me with a hurt expression and say, "Where did you ever get that impression?"

And so now we have Santorum (and presumably his supporters) concerned about the one thing that causes the most harm to American families:

Not guns, which incidentally kill 30,000 people per year. (In fact Santorum and his party are well-known supporters of gun rights. The idea that guns should be regulated is as abhorrent to them as the idea that pornography should be unregulated. They don't seem to see the contradiction.)

Nor does he identify the as one of the greatest threats to families (which also is responsible for 30,000 deaths per year) or tobacco (100,000 per year), or alcohol (50,000 per year).

No, he wants to ban pornography.

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Part of the problem with the Republican party is that it has since the 1980s been made up of an awkward alliance between the religious right and the libertarians.

Thus Obama's Health Care plan was denounced in the shrillest terms as too much government intereference in your life.

This by the same party who wants to regulate who you can and can't get married to. And now wants to regulate what you can and can't masturbate to in the privacy of your own home.

It's built on a party that either overlooks this contradiction, or believes that God has given them the duty to interfere in everyone else's sex life.

Because the religious right finds pornography offensive, they must ban it for everyone.

I realize that we are in the midst of primary craziness, and that most of these issues will die away during the general election in November. But it's interesting to see what motivates the religious right.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky speaks to Dutch activists on various topics