Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is the only Republican presidential candidate who hasn’t spent a few glorious days at the top of the polls, but now he’s hoping for a last-minute surge in Iowa. And why shouldn’t he?
Santorum oozes accomplishment — elected to the Senate in 1994 at the age of 36, he spent his last six years as the third-ranking Republican in the body before he was voted out in 2006. He’s camped out in Iowa for months courting local political and religious leaders, recently receiving endorsements from some of the most influential social conservatives in the state. He’s performed well in debates, and, unlike Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, he has a perfect record on issues like abortion and marriage: in 2003, while still in office, he famously said that “if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to [gay] 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 have the right to anything.”
But more important than fiery rhetoric is his experience on the ground, where he, or at least his staffers, have seen the consequences of the gay agenda up close. After he made those comments in 2003, reporters discovered that his Scranton office at 527 Linden Street was located a door away from The Silhouette Lounge, a gay leather bar that had won local awards. A bartender named Johnny reportedly delivered a message for the Senator, according to a news report published in The Hill: “Come on over sometime.”
Santorum doesn’t talk much about his official stay near the leather bar, especially now that the two venues in question have disappeared from the map.
But just do a Google search for “Santorum” and you can see that the battle scars from his fight with those-who-defend-the-rights-of-people-to-love-anyone-despite-their-gender have not gone away. (Click here for an explanation of how Santorum’s name became synonymous with the idiosyncratic result of behavior he does not approve of.)
And he still knows the stakes. “Unless we protect it with the institution of marriage, our country will fall,” he warned at a Thanksgiving event last month.
