re: #665 HappyWarrior

Missing in all this - Santorum came out and said that if elected President, he’d push to nullify all gay marriages, even if states passed enabling legislation to do so (so far - CT, DC, IA, MA, NH, NY, VT). Several others, like NJ have civil unions or similar language.

But how he gets there is just downright bizarre. He seems to think that he could get a constitutional amendment (75% of states) prohibiting gay marriage and defining marriage as one woman-one man, and with a growing number of states adopting gay marriage, chances for that are slipping away:

Rick Santorum says he’ll try to unmarry all of them if he’s elected president.

Once the U.S. Constitution is amended to prohibit same-gender marriages, “their marriage would be invalid,” the former Pennsylvania senator said Dec. 30 in an NBC News interview.

“We can’t have 50 different marriage laws in this country,” he said. “You have to have one marriage law.”

The comments didn’t attract nearly as much attention as Santorum’s recent invocation of his Catholic faith to denounce government support for birth control, prenatal testing and resource conservation - which, in the last case, he attributed to President Obama’s “phony theology.”

But his declared intention to nullify past as well as future same-sex marriages has reinforced his position to the right of the other Republican contenders, even though each of them has also voiced fervent support for traditional unions.

Fact is that the states have historically dealt with the issue at the state level - federalism is such a bore to folks like Santorum who ignore it when it suits them.

But the moment they hate something that the federal government does, they’re clamoring for states’ rights.

It also speaks to his cynicism. He must know that an amendment wont be happening, but his right wing/socon base ignores the sociopolitical realities and laps it up. He gets the benefit of an extremist position without fear that it may not come to pass.