Sunday Shows III: Santorum on "This Week"
ThinkProgress has the transcript of Senator Santorum's appearance with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week." Some excerpts:
"I disagree with Senator Frist. I think that you cannot take a utilitarian approach to human life. And this is an innocent human life. You’re destroying this life for the purpose of research which has questionable value."
Santorum called Frist's decision to back stem cell research "problematic for him" with the conservative base of the Republican Party should he opt to run for president. He said that the president will, "without question," veto Specter-Harkin if it passes the Senate. "I mean, the president understands that the federal government should not be on the side of taking innocent human life, period."
The Pennsylvania senator said that while he supports a constitutional amendment to ban abortion (as, unfortunately, the Republican Party's platform has done since 1984), he has not introduced an amendment because "we’re so far away from any potential of doing a constitutional amendment. The bottom line is, what we want is the people to speak on this issue."
There was some discussion about Santorum's new book, during the course of which the senator characterized Hillary Clinton as "a radical feminist": "I mean, read her work and what she’s done on children’s rights. I mean, that’s radical. I mean, you’re talking about giving children the same - that children have rights equal to adults. I mean, that is not a nurturing atmosphere of mothers and fathers taking responsibility for shaping the moral vision of their children." (Much more of this line in the full transcript).
Asked about 2008, Santorum first said "I am not going to run," then in the next breath "I said I have no intention of running," which Steph pointed out are rather different. They went back and forth a bit before Santorum settled on "Well, all I’ve — you know, the only thing I always say is that I just simply don’t ever lock a door, because strange things happen. But let me assure you that I’m running for the whip position in the United States Senate. I wouldn’t be running for the whip position in the United States Senate and asking my colleagues for their vote if I had intention of going off and running around the country campaigning for president. I don’t. I’m not going to go running around the country campaigning for president. That much I will tell you."
Whew.
posted by JBD @ 1:15 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Perhaps Mr. Santorum knows he has a snowball's chance of winning the nom, let alone beating Hillary in the election. But Mr. Santorum's voice needs to be heard, just to show America that the right wing extremists are just as deluded and dangerous as the left wing extremists.
During the Schiavo mess, and I think elsewhere, I've heard pro-lifers use "utilitarian" as a pejorative. Although Santorum seems to be using it somewhat accurately, I'm curious if the word is becoming part of the pro-life codetalk -- like 'Dred Scott' has been in the past.
I'm not a utilitarian myself -- and don't think stem-cell research destroys human life, let alone does so on utilitarian grounds. Instead, there's a really mixed up idea of what "protecting life" extends to, especially when "life" has no comprehension of flourishing or meaningfulness to it -- that to me ethical theories that don't take that into account when talking about life are pushing a very whithered sense of "life."
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