Dan Savage, the gay writer, sex advice columnist, and creator of the It Gets Better Project, appeared on The Young Turks today to discuss the legitimacy of Rick Santorum's Presidential bid.
Santorum came in second place at yesterday's Iowa Caucus, a gathering of Midwestern Republican voters. He was only eight votes short of beating Mitt Romney. That symbolic vote was a big political boost for Santorum who once was a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, and known largely for expressing negative beliefs about gay sex and the LGBT community ad nauseum. Eight years ago, Savage asked his fans for a new definition for the word "Santorum," and since then an anal-sex "byproduct" has been the top search result on Google.
Dan Savage said in his discussion with TYT's host, Cenk Uygur, that Santorum is also against many sexual interests of heterosexual men and women, too -- like oral "sodomy" and condoms:
''What a lot of people will wake up to, as they get more familiar with Rick Santorum, is that he has an anti-straight freedom agenda. He doesn't have just an anti-gay agenda. He has an anti-straight agenda when it comes to reproductive freedom, when it comes to birth control, when it comes to masturbation, pornography -- all sorts of things that heterosexuals enjoy very much.
''Rick Santorum has an agenda to ban it because his faith dictates that 'because he's a Catholic, you shouldn't be allowed to use birth control.' ... [T]he overwhelming majority of Catholics do use birth control. And as straight people will wake up to the fact that anti-gay bigots are also anti-straight bigots, we're going to see Rick Santorum's numbers fall and fall fast.''
Rachel Maddow, a longtime foe of Santorum's anti-gay politics, began the process of "vetting" both Santorum on last night's MSNBC program. She began by digging up Santorum's unethical connection to Nevada's disgraced Senator John Ensign, his keen use of Congressional "earmarks," his stated opposition to contraception, and his odd blaming of abortions for a demographic problem facing Social Security:
Thom Hartmann of RT also discussed Santorum's interest in allowing government entities to ban condom use as an attack on an individual's right to privacy. He also proposed an additional definition for ''Santorum'':
