To the editor:

Sen. Santorum claimed four years ago that Satan had his sights on America using the vices of pride, vanity and sensuality. Sensuality? It’s not even in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. One definition in that dictionary of Satan is “one who plots against another.”

Santorum’s views mirror those of the Reactionary Generation of the ’40s and the discredited years of McCarthyism. Santorum’s attacks on women (he opposes the Supreme Court’s 1965 striking of bans on contraceptives), on gay rights and equality preserves fundamentalist authoritarian social structures and puritanical sexual attitudes (sex is for procreation only). His contempt for different behaviors is because they’re “counter to how things are supposed to be.”  He is antagonistic toward the Anglo-American legal tradition where the law regards all as equals and at liberty to pursue their affairs as they wish as long as no harm is done to others.

Santorum champions no government regulation of businesses but zealous regulation of your private affairs. Will his prescriptions assure a minimum of life’s satisfactions for the majority? Support public education?  It is “anachronistic.” Respect religious freedom? He implies that Mormonism is “a dangerous cult.” As intolerant as any country parson in Sinclair Lewis he would give us four years of rapacious corporate behavior and fights between rival hoodlum billionaires. This isn’t the vision of the Gilbertines or the aggiornamento of Vatican II. It is regressive Erastianism. Like any amoral, vulgar demagogue Santorum is “one who plots against another.”