Rick Santorum Tells It Like It Is

Yesterday on the Hugh Hewitt radio show Rick Santorum told the uncomfortable truth about the tragedy of the Catholic Conference of Catholic Bishops playing footsie with the most radically secular and anti-Christian administration in US history. Here is an excerpt from the transcript:

HH: Now I want to talk to you about two substantive issues, Senator Santorum. The first are these new regulations from the Obama administration. I read the letter from Archbishop Olmstead of Phoenix on the air. Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles has written a new article in First Things. It’s shocking, actually, what’s going on. Should this be a centerpiece of whoever the nominee’s campaign is?

RS: I talked about it in every speech I’ve given today. And here’s what I said, though, Hugh. I said that I took issue with the Catholic Bishops Conference, because Hugh, you may remember, they embraced Obamacare.

HH: Yes.

RS: They embraced it and said…here’s what I said to them. Be careful when you have government saying that they can give you rights, that you have a right to health care, and government’s going to give you something, because once you are now dependant on government, they, not only can they take that right away, they can tell you how to exercise that right, and you can either like it or not. And that’s the problem. That’s what the Catholic Bishops Conference didn’t get, that there’s no free lunch here, folks. If you’re going to give people secular power, then they’re going to use it in a secular fashion. And that’s why, you know, I hate to say it, but you know, you had it coming. And it’s time to wake up and realize that government isn’t the answer to the social ills. It’s people of faith, and it’s families, and it’s communities, and it’s charities that need to do this as it has in America so successfully for so long.

HH: Rick Santorum, what do you advise Catholic hospitals, Catholic colleges, Catholic…the centers of poverty assistance, the adoption agencies? What do you advise them to do in the face of, as Archbishop Olmstead said, we cannot comply with this unjust law?

RS: Civil disobedience. This will not stand. There’s no way they can make this stand. The Supreme Court, eventually, this thing’s going to get to the Supreme Court just like the ministerial hiring issue that was just decided by the Supreme Court the other day. And it was a 9-0 decision that said the Obama administration can’t roll over people of faith when it comes to hiring. Yet in the face of that decision, this radical, secular government of Barack Obama continues to have faith be the least important of the 1^st Amendment. And I just think they fight. They fight in the courts, and they fight by civil disobedience, and go to war with the federal government over this one.

HT: Sam Dempster.

There is so much to like here: honesty, clarity and courage. But I think what stands out to me is his optimism. He quotes the recent Supreme Court case in which the court ruled 9-0 that the federal government can't make religious organizations hire atheists just because it wants to do so. Religious freedom is endangered, but not dead yet, in the United States of America.

Optimism was Reagan's greatest asset. Conservatives are easily caricatured as gloomy, pessimistic, backward-looking thinkers and Reagan made it impossible to regard him in that way. Gingrich is not the Reagan in this race and Romney is the second coming of George H. W. Bush. Gingrich only talks conservatism; Romney can't even do that without flubbing his lines. The true Reagan conservative is Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum for president!