Go together like a carriage and horse

(See that? It was a complex pun involving “love and marriage, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” and “putting the cart before the horse.” Ha.)

Senator Rick Santorum continues to say deeply creepy things about love, sex, and marriage. Moreover, they’re things that are just as troubling to heterosexuals as they are to homosexuals, though thanks to our wonderful news media you’d never know it. This time around, he argues, quite passionately, that marriage is about procreation, not love. Among the many troubling logical extensions of this belief are the notion that there’s nothing really wrong with arranged marriages, and that infertile couples, or (God forbid) couples who simply don’t want to have kids have invalid marriages. I feel that it needs to be repeated: This man is a senator.

With each statement, Santorum makes a little more apt my half-joking comparisons of the GOP’s cultural conservatives to the Taliban. He’s a true reactionary, a bona fide fundamentalist and theocrat, and he has no business being a major player in a major political party.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan is all over him; scroll down for a related discussion of how the Roman Catholic Church has officially condemned homosexuality but never felt moved to make similar statements about slavery. God help us all.