News From the Santorum

He lost his re-election bid and no longer holds public office, but that hasn't stopped ousted Republican Rick Santorum from spreading shit.

In a recent Philadelphia Inquirer column Rick Santorum penned a shrill rant against the California Supreme Court for its recent ruling allowing gay marriage.

To underscore his assertion that gay marriage = the collapse of civilization, he (inaccurately!) points to Norway:

"Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived (WRONG!)and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent (WRONG!) for firstborn children. Too bad for those kids who probably won’t have a dad around, but we can’t let the welfare of children stand in the way of social affirmation, can we?

But what about love? That’s the question a student asked this winter when I spoke at Georgetown University.

Is anyone saying same-sex couples can’t love each other? I love my children (hopefully NOT like same-sex couples love each other you sick, sick bastard). I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too? Marriage is and always has been more than the acknowledgment of the love between two people (Is Santorum referring to arrainged marriages that were the norm until the late 1800's?).

Like the lying piece of shit that he is, Santorum gives no sources for his inaccurate statistics. Norway began allowing same-sex civil unions in 1993.
But according to M.V. Lee Badgett, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Norway’s “big surge” in the nonmarital birth rate occurred in the 1980s, jumping from 16 percent to 39 percent. In the decade after Norway authorized civil unions, the nonmarital birth rate rose only “slightly,” and then, “after a couple of years, leveled off at 50 percent.” These rates are similar to those in countries without such laws.

Additionally, in a 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed, William Eskridge, Jr., a Yale professor, and author Darren Spedale found that heterosexual marriage rates have actually risen 12.7 percent in Norway since 1993. Similarly, divorce rates amongst heterosexual couples have fallen 6 percent.

(I have altered this original story from ThinkProgress http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/22/santorum-gay/ with my own comments and expletives)

Santorum is now a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center so I sent an email to him there asking for his sources about the Norway stats. I think getting a response is about as likely as finding a Republican pol who can tell the truth.

Those whose arguments are empty of fact, are generally full of shit.™