Republican Rick Santorum wants to be President – again.
Let’s take a walk down Memory Lane and to see what he had to say about single mothers, shall we?
Maybe you remember all the way back to 1994 when he was running for Senate? Mother Jones did, and they published a piece on Santorum during his bid for the White House in 2012. It’s worth revisiting now.
During his first U.S. Senate campaign, he warned voters of a danger so awful and horrible, it would destroy America: SINGLE MOTHERS!!!
(Insert dramatic horror music.)
Transcripts reveal part of a speech delivered by Santorum in 1994 to a crowd in Pennsylvania, “Most people agree a continuation of the current [welfare] system will be the ruination of this country. We are seeing it. We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it’s falling apart because of single moms,” Santorum preached.
On the camping trail, he boasted about his landmark welfare reform. He even had a prop to illustrate his points: a poster-size chart tracking the increase of welfare rolls since 1965 compared with the increase of children born to single moms who were in dire need of an ass kicking.
“Open up the current periodicals—study after study, article after article, children having children is destroying the fabric of our country. If you want to close your eyes to it, if you don’t care about it, if you don’t want to solve it, if you want to continue the system, to let people stay and spiral—go ahead. Not with me.” Single mothers, Santorum asserted, needed politicians who weren’t afraid of “kicking them in the butt.”
A month later, the evangelical Senate candidate told a crowd in Erie, PA that welfare reform wasn’t simply about cutting government spending, it was also a public safety issue, “What we have is moms raising children in single-parent households simply breeding more criminals.”
He toned down his anti-single mom rhetoric in 2012 but maybe that’s because he realized that it was a tad insulting.
#Frothy
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