No, Mr. Santorum, religious freedom does not mean “everybody do what I tell them.”

I’m not at all surprised Rick Santorum has done as well in the Republican primaries as he has.
In a campaign filled with pro-theocracy conservatives, he’s the most outspoken about the right of the right to impose its faith on everyone else (and also the most articulate about it). In a recent column, he makes the same argument I’ve heard religious conservatives make for years: Denying them the right to control America’s sex life (among other things) is tantamount to religious discrimination. I’m not aware of any of the other candidates saying it quite so openly.
Santorum’s pitch is the standard line I’ve heard many times before: He’s acting on his principles, like Martin Luther King, like the Founding Fathers, like countless activists throughout American history. To say that he shouldn’t follow the dictates of his church is no different from shutting religion out of the public square. Separation of church and state is a myth.
Taking it from the top:
•In what possible way is faith being shut out of the public square? Nobody is shutting Rick Santorum up. There’s no risk of armed mobs of anti-Catholics attacking and burning his house as if this were Northern Ireland when the Troubles were at their height. Hell, when the Supreme Court guarantees Fred Phelps the right to protest at soldier’s funerals (he believes God strikes our soldiers dead because America’s too gay-friendly), I’d say the public square is pretty safe.
What may be confusing Santorum is that people are criticizing him and his faith, and he feels as if he’s being shut out. But guess what, Mr. S.—nothing in the Constitution guarantees you or the Catholic Church immunity to criticism. The fact you and the U.S. Conference of Bishops sincerely believe God opposes gay marriage, abortion and gay rights no more means we have to respect that position than we have to respect someone who believes in the burning of witches or that God wants blacks back in slavery.
As he points out in the article, he doesn’t agree with the church on many points (anything departing from Republican orthodoxy, in essence), so he can’t simply claim faith as a justification for his positions. He chooses which positions to support, so if he can’t stand the heat he should get out of the kitchen.
Point the second: There’s a difference between religious people fighting a secular injustice and religious people fighting to impose their faith. Martin Luther King could make a clear case for the manifest secular injustice of the Jim Crow system. Ditto the feminist movement and the gay rights movement.
Santorum? The most he can offer for why states should be able to ban birth control is “It’s not natural.” Nor can he show how gay marriage inflicts any injustice comparable to segregation (despite the lies by Charles Colson and others that gays treat anti-gay activists the way Nazis treated Jews.
Point the third: Santorum’s lying. Maybe too himself too, but seriously, does anyone reading this believe that if Muslims actively pushed for sharia law, he’d consider them to be true believers acting on their faith, just like he is? He’s repeatedly accused Obama of being “pagan” but he uses the accusation to imply that invalidates Obama’s positions (just for the record, Obama’s a Christian—although Santorum doesn’t agree there are liberal Christians). Like every theocrat, Muslim, Protestant, Catholic or Jewish, when he talks about acting on God’s will, he’s talking about his interpretation, nobody else’s.
In short, he’s precisely the kind of religious zealot we have the First Amendment to protect against.