Fifty years ago, then-presidential candidate JFK delivered a historic speech on the separation of church and state to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. As the first Catholic candidate for president, he’d been facing concerns that he wouldn’t follow the will of the people, but of some dude in a pointy hat.
Half a century later, former Senator Rick Santorum will challenge JFK’s/Thomas Jefferson’s/the U.S. Constitution’s quaint notion in what promises to be a stirring speech at the University of St. Thomas on September 9.
After leaving the Senate in 2007, Santorum co-founded the Program to Protect America’s Freedom at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center.
(And it’s a good thing; in the two and a quarter centuries before
Santorum’s initiative, no governmental body had been established to
ensure national security — a major oversight, to say the least).
Of course, Santorum is still familiar to many as the sitting senator who once described the Catholic Church’s child-rape scandal — i.e., the one where bishops
covered up for grown men who raped children — as a “basic homosexual
relationship” between priests and “post-pubescent men.” It was also
during that interview where Santorum lumped homosexuality in with
bestiality, adultery and polygamy as “behavior that’s antithetical to
strong healthy families.”
(Somehow, this offended uppity gays like writer Dan Savage — such drama queens! — who invented a new definition for “santorum”: “The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”)
The speech is free and sponsored by the Pope John Paul II Forum for the Church in the Modern World and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. (We’re waiting to hear from Forum Director Dr. John Hittinger, as well as Valerie Hall of UST Academic Affairs, and will update accordingly).
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2010.
