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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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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