Is Santorum the GOP's Most Extreme Candidate?

Blogging at Loop21, Zerlina Maxwell weighs in on Rick Santorum's rhetoric about the separation between church and state. She says that it highlights how deeply out of sync he is with mainstream America and why he is the Republican Party's most extreme presidential candidate.

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Rick Santorum's extreme views on separation between church and state are alarming.

Republican hopefuls like Rick Santorum speak of President Obama’s war on religion with an aura of urgency that might leave some to believe that the claim is more than hot air. What’s more accurate is that Santorum and his ilk have their own war on non-believers meant to alienate those who do not believe in any one God or that there is a God at all. 

Last week, Rick Santorum implied President Obama is a “phony” Christian without any evidence. Franklin Graham elaborated on this and also claimed that President Obama may not in fact be a Christian. These attacks are nothing new, and they are normally framed as the Obama administration’s “war on religion.” It may in fact be more accurate to describe these attacks as the right’s war of religion.

Rick Santorum’s rhetoric of late has exposed a deeply theocratic worldview which contradicts the values set forth in our founding documents. There is in fact a separation of church and state, no matter how sick it makes Santorum when that fact is pointed out. Santorum told ABC News recently that his misquoted interpretation of President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religious freedom made him want to puke, “What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up and it should make every American," said Santorum. "Now we're going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square."

"The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country," said the Republican contender. 

Read Zerlina Maxwell's entire blog entry at Loop21.