Boston Globe:
Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, refused yesterday to back off on his earlier statements connecting Boston's ''liberalism' with the Roman Catholic Church pedophile scandal, saying that the city's ''sexual license' and ''sexual freedom' nurtured an environment where sexual abuse would occur.
Of course. Because sex and rape are the same thing.
Here's what Santorum believes occured: Catholics priests, who are among the most repressed people in the country, saw other people having fun. So they went and did things the people having the good clean safe consensual fun would never have dreamed of doing.
Brilliant.
The senator's words sparked instant reaction from Massachusetts political leaders, who ridiculed Santorum's suggestion that priests were driven to abuse children by the city's liberal culture.
US Representative Barney Frank, a Newton Democrat, called Santorum ''a jerk" and pointed out that the senator tried to use the levers of the federal government to block the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, an act that Santorum likened to ''execution." An autopsy found that Schiavo's brain was half the normal size and that she could not see anything.
''This is one of those people who claims to have had eye contact with a blind woman," Frank said.
Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Lowell, said, ''There's not much you can say about someone who claims to have read the Bible cover to cover and came away from it thinking it encourages hatred for fellow human beings."
David Wade, spokesman for Senator John F. Kerry, said, ''Sometimes you wonder whether Rick Santorum can possibly believe the radically wrong words that escape his mouth."