It is difficult to provide the proper rebuke to a man like Rick Santorum, who has spent much of his adult life trying to impose his religious beliefs on the American people through public office. After all, throughout his career, Santorum has drawn the disdain of voters and strangers alike, and before he was voted out of the Senate, he was ranked as the most disliked Senator in Washington. As with any candidate, Rick Santorum’s weakness lies in the true nature of his character: Santorum is an Evangelical zealot; a god-guided missionary, not a constituency-guided representative, and that is why he is incapable of understanding what it means to govern in a democracy.  Not only is Rick Santorum unfit for the Presidency, he is unfit for public office in a Republic.

There are many political issues on which Rick Santorum would make any thinking person’s skin crawl, but the most telling glimpse into Santorum’s character comes from his personal life.  Santorum has six children, one of whom suffers from a severe genetic disorder, Trisomy 18.   Half of all infants with Trisomy 18 die within the first week, though children can live into their teens, albeit with severe medical and developmental problems. This fact leads many parents of would-be Trisomy 18 children to consider abortion. But not the Santorums, who pride themselves in the lessons they have learned from their ill-fated child. Another of Santorum’s children, Gabriel, suffered a fatal defect and died after a premature birth at 20 weeks (although Santorum’s wife Karen suffered a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that nearly reached 105, she was reluctant in acquiescing to take the drug Pitocin to speed the birth). As reported by the New York Times:

What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish–others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home. ”Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!” Karen writes in the book ["Letters to Gabriel"], which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. ”Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, ‘This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.’ ”

Snapshot of a cultural divide indeed. Rick Santorum’s views on reproduction and sexuality are his most extreme and divisive positions–and no wonder, they are tied to intense family trauma. In addition to opposing abortion in any situation, even to save the life of the mother, Santorum opposes stem-cell research and the use of contraception, stating last October, ”Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

In fact, Rick Santorum holds such extreme religious beliefs that he would undo decades of established constitutional law so that he could impose his views on other Americans. Santorum has long criticized the seminal Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which overturned a Connecticut law that banned contraception and provided a basis in law for the right to privacy.

Santorum has also criticized another cornerstone of civil rights: Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down a Texas sodomy statute. The facts behind Lawrence v. Texas make Santorum’s position particularly unpalatable: John Lawrence and his partner were having consensual sex in their home late at night, when a Texas sheriff’s deputy entered their apartment with his gun drawn and arrested them.  This happened in 1998. While the idea that the government could come into your home and arrest you for private acts committed in your own bedroom is abhorrent to the vast majority of Americans, Santorum has defended this type of law, stating that “if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery.” (You do have the right to adultery.)

Well, it is no wonder that Rick Santorum wants to turn back the clock on constitutional law: his views on sex and sexuality are antiquated and abusive. In fact, Rick Santorum has “frequently compared same-sex relationships to [sex with] inanimate objects like trees, basketballs, beer, and paper towels,” and his nonchalant comparison of homosexuality to bestiality in 2003 launched an all-out response from the gay community that resulted in the coining of a new syllogism, which has since been referred to as Santorum’s “Google problem.”

Santorum’s religious moralizing, unsurprisingly, extends beyond sex and sexuality. He has also been a vocal opponent of evolution, calling for the teaching of “competing views” on the well-established biological theory.  In defense of the so-called Santorum Amendment, which was initially proposed in 2001 and would promote the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, Santorum claimed, “By passing it we were showing our desire that students studying controversial issues in science, such as biological evolution, should be allowed to learn about competing scientific interpretations of evidence. As a result of our vote today that position is about to become a position of the Congress as a whole.”  The problem with Santorum’s view, of course, is that intelligent design is not in fact a scientific theory, and there is no controversy in science about evolution.

In fact, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, representing some 10 million scientists and academics, issued a statement in 2006 asserting, “Evolution is one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science,” and noting that, “Some bills seek to discredit evolution by emphasizing so-called ‘flaws’ in the theory of evolution or ‘disagreements’ within the scientific community. Others insist that teachers have absolute freedom within their classrooms and cannot be disciplined for teaching non-scientific ‘alternatives’ to evolution. A number of bills require that students be taught to ’critically analyze’ evolution or to understand ‘the controversy.’  But there is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.”

Evolution tree. Yes you are in there.

In reality, the controversy surrounding evolution is purely a religious one. Just as there are still organizations today who believe the Earth is the center of the universe (because the Bible says so), there are also people who believe in the idea that an intelligent creator guides the progress of biology (“intelligent design”).  But intelligent design has no place in the classroom, just as geocentricism and the proposition that aliens planted life on Earth have no place in the classroom.  Ultimately, the courts have agreed with the scientists, and in 2005 a district court judge overturned a Pennsylvania school board’s decision to teach intelligent design in public schools, and all eight board members who had supported the policy were subsequently voted out of office. As for Rick Santorum, even though he backtracked on the intelligent design controversy, he too met his electoral demise in the following Senatorial election.

Santorum’s children, as he and other Republican candidates have been quick to advertise, are home-schooled. They therefore will not encounter viewpoints that run counter to Santorum’s views, even if those viewpoints are right. And this is the America Santorum wants to be imposed on the rest of us: one where his viewpoints are not challenged, and if they are, he has the power to overrule those people.

It is no wonder then that Santorum is so hostile to the courts and believes that Congress has the authority “to repeal those courts, to abolish these courts” if he does not like their decisions.  As Santorum has asserted, “Our country is based on a moral enterprise. Gay marriage is wrong…as a president I will get involved because the states [by passing gay marriage laws] don’t have a right to undermine the basic fundamental values that hold this country together. America is an ideal. It’s not just a constitution, it is an ideal. It’s a set of morals and principles…” Well, it is time Americans asked themselves in earnest, are these your morals and principles too? Because Rick Santorum is prepared to subordinate the Constitution to them.

Clearly, Rick Santorum’s greatest weakness lies in the blinding intensity of his religious conviction.  He is guided so much by his religious beliefs that he demonstrates a lack of civic understanding for the separation of powers in American government and the purpose of democratic government. To be clear, that purpose is to provide a forum in which competing viewpoints can have a voice and vie for dominance without imposing on our natural rights as human beings. Santorum’s political views would impose on many of our natural rights as human beings, and that is why he keeps running into one political defeat after another. But he is a moral crusader, so if other people in U.S. push back against him and his views, he will seek to achieve his policies the only way he can: by amassing power. He will run for President.