I had intended to blog about something entirely different this morning but have put it aside to post the following news article which actually appears on Susan Higginbotham’s blog. Susan is an historical fiction author and if you like reading about the Tudor era, I recommend reading her works.
As for Rick Santorum’s remarks when interviewed in Madison…I’m a native of Wisconsin and quite familiar with the very liberal(at least it was when I was going to college) U of Wisconsin, which makes me wonder what the energy was like in the crowd…moreover, if Margaret George was home, I wonder what she thought about his very bizarre remarks regarding Mary…it boggles the mind. This completely convinces me the man needs serious therapy to work out his family of origin dysfunctions.
Madison, Wisconsin—She’s known to us today as “Bloody Mary.” But for Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, she is a woman to be esteemed.
Speaking at a campaign stop at the University of Wisconsin, Santorum, when asked by a student questioner whether there was a historical woman he particularly admired, cited the first reigning Tudor queen. “First, she had strong religious principles, and she wasn’t too politically correct to act upon them,” said Santorum. “Second, she got married, unlike her younger sister Elizabeth, who didn’t think she needed a man to help her rule. Mary understood the importance of faith and family in a way that Elizabeth never did.”
Asked his opinion of Mary’s policy of burning Protestants, Santorum said, “You could argue—and I will argue—that Mary’s strong moral convictions were preferable to this wishy-washy notion of tolerance that the left has, where Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, goddess-worship, paganism, and atheism are all of the same value, are all points of view to be allowed. Where has that led us? Into a moral cesspool.”
Santorum, who has said that the notion of separation of church and state makes him want to “throw up,” hastened to add, “That’s not to say that I believe Mary was one hundred percent correct in burning Protestants. There are certainly decent Protestants, then and now, though I can safely say that if Mary had seen the state of the Anglican Church today, and of mainline Protestantism in the United States, she would have probably burned more of them.”
The candidate looked thoughtful when asked by another student whether he would support burning nonbelievers and non-Christians in an effort to purify the condition of religion in the United States. “Besides the obvious spiritual benefits, burning these people at the stake would have the side effect of bringing down the unemployment rate, both by reducing the surplus population and by putting right-thinking Americans to work ferreting out heretics, but as it stands now, it’s probably illegal under the Eighth Amendment. Until we get that amendment and the First Amendment tweaked a bit, we might just have to settle for singeing people.”