I WAS GOING to begin this column as a plea to Rick Santorum to shut the hell up already.
Stop, I was going to beg Sen. McSweaterVest, with the nonsense that contraception is evil "because it's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."
Which he believes to be sex for procreation only. So, will Santorum move to the sofa after wife Karen is menopausal and her dusty ovaries have coughed out their last eggs?
Enough, I was going to add, with the lunacy that public education is "anachronistic." Karen Santorum home-schools the kids (using at least $100,000 in public funds to do it), so all families should, too, because "it's [parents'] responsibility to educate their children."
Since it's also a parent's responsibility to feed their kids, should we all be farmers, too?
Please, I planned to implore Santorum, stuff a sock in your pie hole before decrying the evils of prenatal testing, especially when a prenatal ultrasound diagnosed a heart abnormality in a fetus Karen once carried.
Karen underwent in-utero surgery to treat the defect (the fetus died anyway). Shouldn't every woman have access to the kind of testing Karen took advantage of?
But the more I thought about asking Santorum to shut up, the more I realized that we need him to keep blathering.
Because the more he talks, the more he reminds us that the personal liberties enjoyed by Americans - particularly female Americans - are always at threat from primitive minds that want to rescind rights we thought had already been won.
You know, the right to control our bodies, including whether and when to have sex. The right to decide whether to become parents. The right to decide how to educate our children.
In Santorumville, Ma is whelping and educating an ever-expanding brood on the prairie while Pa brings home the lobbyist's bacon to pay for it all.
Good for Santorum for creating the life he wants. But how dare he presume that it's the only life worth living, the only one - if he becomes president - that's worth government support.
See, that's the problem with a primitive mind: It sees anything other than itself as a threat.
Serial skirt-chaser and thrice-married Newt Gingrich, for example, never respected the sanctity of marriage until gays wanted to wed. Then he was all about "protecting" the institution he trampled with impunity.
