You know I rarely say this, but please listen to this recording of Santorum. This is from 2008 and just shortly before I first discovered Santorum. I was a Christian when he first crossed my radar and I was shocked that listening to him speak about government sounded more like hearing a televangelist than a non-biased political leader. He scared me back then. When he entered this Presidential race, I didn’t give him much of chance of making it this far because if I knew this about him, the rest of the country had to know it too. Right?
When I’ve said that I don’t understand how he made it this far THIS is what I’ve been talking about. He has never hidden his pulpit politicking. He has always led with a religions mindset. This is what America has allowed to make it to the top GOP spot in the Presidential race. Please do not be apathetic. Do not think that he is too radical for him to ever get elected if his name ends up on the ticket in November. I didn’t expect him to make it this far, I’ve been proven wrong. History does not repeat itself, but people do repeat history. Don’t forget that it wasn’t that long ago that we were saying that GW Bush would never get elected President. Please vote, don’t get over confident for a second.
The transcript below of his speech was found over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars on the freethoughtblogs. All emphasis are mine. ~ Kim
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Santorum vs. Satan
You might think that Rick Santorum is running against Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, but he’s not. As he explained to students at Tom Monaghan’s Ave Maria University, he’s battling against Satan himself, who is destroying every American institution.
This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.
He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.
He was successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.
And you say “what could be the impact of academia falling?” Well, I would have the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders in our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.
And so what we saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being education in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and pride to also go after the Church.
After that, you start destroying the Church and you start destroying academia, the culture is where their next success was and I need not even go into the state of the popular culture today. Whether its sensuality of vanity of the famous in America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners, the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.
The fourth, and this was harder, now I know you’re going to challenge me on this one, but politics and government was the next to fall. You say, ‘you would think they would be the first to fall, as fallible as we are in politics,’ but people in political life get elected by ordinary folks from lots of places all over the country where the foundations of this country are still strong. So while we may certainly have had examples, the body politic held up fairly well up until the last couple of decades, but it is falling too.
