Santorum in Your Pants

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/6184429412/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

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Rick Santorum caught a lot of people off guard with his strong showing in the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday. But just in case you forgot how extreme his views are on a number of issues, here he is earlier this week talking about homosexuality and birth control on ABC News.

Discussing the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling that invalidated a Connecticut law banning contraception, he said:

The state has a right to do that. I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right. The state has the right to pass whatever statutes they have. That is the thing I have said about the activism of the Supreme Court, they are creating rights, and they should be left up to the people to decide.

Santorum also argued that there is no constitutionally protected right to sodomy, and that the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas was wrong. “I wouldn’t have voted for that law. I thought that law was an improper law, but that doesn’t mean the state doesn’t have a right to do that,” he said. “We shouldn’t create constitutional rights when states do dumb things.”

Of course, that would be a different idea of what the Constitution is, and why the Supreme Court exists, than most people have.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

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