Keeping the Bullies at Bay…by Dan Lynch

Life overflows with uncertainty. Unexpected events occur all the time. You never know what’ll happen.

One thing we all can be pretty certain of, however. Rick Santorum will never be President of the United States.

Not that it couldn’t happen, but the great likelihood is that the vast bulk of Americans would never permit a total control freak to take over one-third of the federal government. And, like far too many people on the right and left in this increasingly divided country of ours, that’s what Santorum is – a control freak of truly terrifying proportions.

Rick Santorum wants to control what you read and watch and what you do. He feels a powerful, benevolent obligation to protect you from your own baser urges. He wants control over your sex life. He doesn’t want you using birth control pills, condoms or any other birth control device. He doesn’t want you having sex outside marriage. He wants approval over who you have sex with and how.

In his ferocious control urge, Santorum isn’t all that different from the liberals who couldn’t care less what you do in your sex life but want control over what you eat and what you think and say. It’s the liberals who are pushing Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers to drop his talk radio program, on which he expresses points of view they find objectionable. It’s the liberals who pushed through campus speech codes and hate crime laws that punish people as much for what they think as for what they do. It’s the liberals who want control over every morsel you put in your mouth. If they had their way, you could eat only liberal-approved foods and only in the quantities that liberals deem appropriate.

It’s the liberals who want to ban tobacco but legalize marijuana, cocaine and heroin.

I don’t know about you, but I find these control freaks – these nasty, intrusive, meddling, moralistic bullies who lust for dominion over the thoughts, personal activities and diets of other people – simply appalling. They represent a long tradition in American life, though, from the Puritans of early New England who branded adulterers with the red letter A to the beer-barrel-bashing of Carrie Nation to the gay-hatred festivities of Anita Bryant and company. They all have one thing in common: They just can’t bring themselves to leave other people alone in peace and privacy.

Santorum, though, is the first one of these sanctimonious crazies to get close to the presidency in a long, long time. He just posted on his Web site a promise to crack down on the distribution of pornography.

In the statement, Santorum says, “The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.” If he gets to the White House, Santormum promises, he’ll “vigorously” enforce laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.”

As President, controlling the U. S. Justice Department, he could do that, too. He could shut down U. S.-based porn sites and push for legislation requiring Internet service providers to use “a mandatory filter set up by the government…”

I’m not defending pornography any more than I’m defending race hate, sexual promiscuity, boozing until you barf or gluttonous overeating. What I am defending is the first right of every American – the right to keep a prying, tyrannical government out of our private lives. I’m defending every American’s right to keep the bullying, self-appointed moralizers at bay, the right to be truly free.

Conservatives are supposed to worship liberty, but not, apparently, where sex is concerned. Too many of them want every aspect of your sex life controlled by the government.

At the moment, Rick Santorum is the poster boy for that point of view.