When Rick Santorum has commented about the Obama administration’s rule that religiously affiliated employers must provide contraception coverage with their health insurance, he insists his staunch opposition is based on preserving religious liberty and not to prevent access to birth control.
So you have to wonder how he felt about some of the literature prominently displayed Saturday at an event in Milwaukee called the Defending the American Dream Summit, where Santorum was among the featured speakers.
Santorum spent most of his time slamming Mitt Romney, but as
Think Progress reported, there were some incendiary brochures available to distract summit-goers who didn’t want to hear another stump speech. The materials were published by the
American Life League, which lays claim to being the “largest grassroots Catholic pro-life education organization in the United States.” It was founded by a former staffer of the National Right to Life Committee who felt that group wasn’t conservative enough.
The league’s benign description of itself actually understates a vicious campaign to outlaw all forms of birth control and abortion. Even though Santorum has tacked far to the right on reproductive freedom issues, as the
ACLU Liberty Watch 2012 report cards have shown, as we head into another crucial month of primaries, voters need to know if he is truly in sync with groups that use scare tactics, distortions and falsehoods to make their point.
One of the league’s flyers, shaped like a container used to hold birth-control pills reads: “There is only one way to effectively avoid pregnancy—abstinence. Saving yourself for your future spouse is guaranteed to prevent pregnancy before marriage.”
Can you say buzz kill?
Also available in Milwaukee was a brochure warning women that the morning-after pill has the “potential to abort your baby without you ever knowing it.” Of course, the fact that you can’t become pregnant the day after having sex is lost on the league’s leaders. And how would they know? After all, they’re the ones telling us “chastity is the best choice for single people.”
But the group reserves its darkest bile for
Planned Parenthood. An
unintentionally hilarious video on the website declares Planned Parenthood is run by “perverts” who have “unfettered access to our children” while raking in government money telling teenagers how to have safe sex.
“Just as the goal of a drug dealer is to make drug addicts, Planned Parenthood’s goal is to make sex addicts. And they follow the same business model,” the video bleats.
Wow. Simply wow.
Santorum has not been heard extolling the league’s virtues. But he does support their basic positions. Santorum’s wife Karen
told CNN her husband’s beliefs about contraception were personal and that he would do nothing to prevent women from obtaining birth control. Yet, it’s easy to be a little skeptical.
After all, Santorum did support the failed Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed employers to deny coverage for contraception based on moral grounds. The American Life League must have been proud.
So, is the contraception coverage issue really just one of religious liberty for Santorum? Voters should be told the real answer to that question.
