Rick Santorum and The Handmaid’s Tale

‘It’s not about contraception,” thundered GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum. “It’s about economic liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of religion. It’s about government control of your lives. And it’s got to stop!”

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– Jonah Goldberg, NRO

Rick Santorum scares people. He thinks crazy things. It puts him out of step with America! On issues such as birth control, working women, women in combat, gays in the military and abortion, Rick Santorum is an unabashed heretic against the secular religion of post-modern hedonism. The guy practically walks around saying. “If it feels good, take out your own d— wallet and pay for it!” I hope his cave has a nice warm fire and lot’s pretty charcoal paintings.

The Tampa Bay Times wants you to know, just how retrograde Lord Sweater Vest of The Ruritan Club truly is.

Most Americans don’t share Rick Santorum’s absolutist take on abortion. He’s out of step on women in combat. He questions the values of the two-thirds of mothers who work. He’s even troubled by something as commonplace as birth control – for married couples. Even among a Republican presidential field anxious to please religious conservatives, Santorum’s ideas stand out.

So the Pro-Libertine forces of both the Left and The Right push that Rick Santorum represents an intolerable step backwards. Many fear he will seek to make the United States enforce some form of morality code like the dystoptic future Republic of Gilead from Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Yea verily, Rick Santorum will enforce The Patriarchy. If such is actually the case, here is how I would recommend he proceed to total and utter fascist victory.

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Step 1: Keep Obamacare and greatly empower The DHHS Death Panels. Make the point repeatedly that we have to limit the amount of spending on medical luxury items. Abortions, contraception, Morning After Pills, these are all luxury items that impose undue expense on our over-burdened treasury. Making health insurance pay for all this ridiculous frivolity is simply no longer a prudent decision, given the struggling state of our national finances.

Step 2: Make public benefits such as EBT Cards and Section 8 Housing dependent upon people behaving in accordance with the Divinely Inspired Code of Santorum. Live by The Decalogue or prepare to hit the deck! Yank the benefits on people who dare defy His Radiant Holiness. (And then brag about the budget savings you generate the next time the Sec Treas goes in front of a Congressional Hearing.)

Step 3: Make absolutely certain that all 57 states know good and well that the extent to which they have paved roads and money to operate public schools and health clinics depends heavily upon their adherence to the ukases handed down by The Federal Morale Conditioner and Beneficent-Theocrat, Judge Roy Moore of The Great State of Alabama. You gotta’ use those recess appointment powers for something, President Rick!

Do all that. Just get ‘er done right and pretty, and Rick Santorum can reclaim and preserve a morally pure and absolutist America that obviously never existed even after three bong hits. But just to show you how dumb and non-presidential Rick Santorum obviously is, he’s got the whole playbook screwed up.

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If Rick Santorum really wants churches to be free to teach their own moral beliefs without government interference, he’s going to wish he had a set of earplugs handy once some of these religious leaders tune up. Certainly, the teachings of D. T. Suzuki would have the ring of heresy to one so committed to imposing a Christianist Right theocracy on America. But unless Rick Santorum came around to supporting state-run initiatives just like the ObamaCare mandates, he’d never have the means or the power to enforce the benevolence of his golden message.

Which brings us to the central irony of all the complaints I’ve heard that Rick Santorum’s old-fashioned morality would make him a tyrant. It could certainly make Rick Santorum a gaseous bore around the supper table. But without the government powers he currently opposes, at least rhetorically, The Santorum Great Awakening is about as legally binding on my rights as an American as the typical Papal Bull.

To take the irony just one step further, let’s look at just how government got to assume some of the powers that could make something like Christianist, Fascist, Rights-Trampling Theocratic Red Dawn a viable possibility. The government assumed these powers gradually, over time, by pandering to a juvenile and licentious definition of freedom. We hear an example of this juvenile tom-foolery from Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul.

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“If we are allowed to deal with our eternity and all that we believe in spiritually, and if we’re allowed to read any book that we want under freedom of speech, why is it we can’t put into our body whatever we want?”

This then leads to a clamor amongst the people to make all the negative externalities that come from putting these cute and exotic substances into our body go away. The government then rides to the rescue like a white knight and firehoses the problems with money until all the bad consequences go away. Then the people who like putting the love grass into the hookah become a new dependent class which the government has a new and extra-constitutional power to control.

Get enough people into enough dependence classes and the government no longer has to really care what Catholics, Feminists, Blacks or Comanche Indians really believe or think about anything. The government then has the power to just threaten any recalcitrant tea-bagger types with a shut-off of the deficit-financed cornucopia.

This is why Grumpy Old Man Rick Santorum will never play any higher than Double AA Baseball in the theocracy league. He’d get all huffy and tell all the Ron Paul fans asking for free whacky-weed to get off his lawn like a cranky-old Clint Eastwood Character. If he really wants to establish a new American Theocracy, he needs to become more in line with his opponent, Barack Obama. You have to own the people before you can set up a useful and functioning despotism. Rick Santorum doesn’t want any part of owning a sinful and flawed freak such as little, old moi. This is why I can support Rick Santorum with no concerns whatsoever that I’ll be helping him write the next chapter to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

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