Santorum to Casey: "Your Daddy Hates You"

Via Atrios, I learned that Sen. Rick Santorum (R-ManOnDog) took it upon himself on to speak for his opponent's dead father, opining that Bob Casey's famously pro-life daddy would be "very upset" that his son supports emergency contraception.

If nothing else, Santorum should lose this election because he's now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is a hateful, shameless man who will stop at nothing — not even the grave — to slime his opponent. But if you look at where the conversation went from there, you'll learn something else: Santorum's "pro-life" principles actually serve to encourage more abortions.

Pressed repeatedly as to how he can reconcile his belief that abortion is murder with his support for the "rape, incest, and life of mother" exception, Santorum says:

It is, there’s no question it's the taking of a life. But if it — it is an attempt for me to try to see if we can find common ground to actually make progress in limiting the other abortions. So yes, that’s what I would do.

But, of course, we're not there yet — abortion is still legal, and making claims about how you would still allow the murder you say you oppose to continue out a desire to find common ground is just a bald-faced lie. If you believe that abortion is murder, if you believe that life begins at conception and that that life has the moral status of a person, then you oppose all abortions all the time. And that's just the start — is a woman who falls down the stairs and miscarries guilty of involuntary manslaughter? Stay tuned for this and other exciting episodes of misogyny if we end up in a post-Roe world.

But, if you really want to do something to reduce the number of abortions now, then of course you support emergency contraception. Casey — hardly the NARAL poster boy — is clearly correct when he says:

Tim, I think the science is clear on this. I think it is contraception, and I support it. I think we’ve got to make it widely available, and I think that’s one of the ways, I think, that we reach common ground on the very tough issue of abortion: to reduce the number not just of unwanted pregnancies, but I think emergency contraception can reduce the number of abortions. That’s what we should emphasize.

At this point, Santorum plays the daddy card, proving once and for all that he's not interested in saving his beloved blastocysts, but just scoring some political points by forcing women to make painful personal decisions down the road. For Santorum, "common ground" is a cynical betrayal of his stated principles so as not to completely alienate a large chunk of his voter base that is not as (pardon the pun) dogmatic as he is. For Casey, "common ground" is about doing something that will actually help to solve the real problem of unwanted pregnancies that often end up in abortion. Come election day, the choice here seems quite easy.