Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Rick Santorum: Single mothers are 'breeding more criminals'





For a guy who's still whining about being typecast as the social issues guy, Rick Santorum sure spews a lot of incendiary and attention-grabbing (not to mention hateful) stuff on social issues. Like the scourge of single mothers.
"Most people agree a continuation of the current [welfare] system will be the ruination of this country," Santorum told a town meeting in Clairton, Pa., in February 1994, according to transcripts of the appearance obtained by Mother Jones. "We are seeing it. We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it's falling apart because of single moms." [...]

[...] One month later, at an appearance in Erie, Pa., Santorum framed welfare reform as a public safety issue. "What we have is moms raising children in single-parent households simply breeding more criminals," he said.

None of which is new for Santorum, this Mother Jones article points out. Back when he was in Congress he introduced legislation that not only would have required single mothers to work 35 hours a week as a condition of receiving benefits, it would have denied benefits to women who couldn't or wouldn't identify the father of their child and to teen moms. At least he's not trying to sell himself as a compassionate conservative.

Why does he have such a laser-like focus on single mothers?

In October he told Family Research Council president Tony Perkins that single moms are "the political base of the Democratic party." He continued, "Why? Because it's so tough economically that they look to the government for help and therefore they're going to vote. So if you want to reduce the Democratic advantage, what you want to do is build two-parent families; you eliminate that desire for government."
There you have it. His relentless war on women is all about beating Democrats and shrinking the size of government. He wants it just big enough to fit in a uterus.