Santorum Wants to Be President, Has a Poo Problem

Rick Santorum is thinking of running for president, but he has a serious PR problem. The former senator’s rampant homophobia inspired sex columnist Dan Savage to launch a campaign to usurp the conservative’s name. The result: If you type “Santorum” into Google, you’ll find that, in addition to a former senator, it refers to “that frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”

A Web site launched by Savage to propagate the new word ranks among the top spots in Google’s search results, as of this writing. Also rotating at the top were a Wikipedia article on the former senator and another Wikipedia article titled “Santorum (sexual neologism),” which is quoted below.

Comparing a U.S. senator to the byproduct of anal sex may be sophomoric, but is it more offensive than saying, as Santorum did in 2003, “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything”? — PS

(h/t: Political Wire)

Wikipedia:

The Economist noted in January 2006 that “gay activists use [Santorum’s] name to denote something indescribable in a family newspaper.” In April 2006, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the “disgusting” definition was “spreading like kudzu on the internet.” The Inquirer described the Savage coinage and other references to Santorum in The Sopranos and Veronica Mars as illustrating his name’s evolution into “cultural shorthand … for social conservatism.” The regional gay newspaper Bay Windows said in August 2006 that Savage had “succeeded in turning [Santorum’s name] into an oft-Googled slang term.” According to the Philadelphia Weekly, writing in October 2006, the term “gained real traction” and “found its way into salacious dictionaries — and books published on actual paper,” with Savage admitting that he “worked pretty hard” to get it out there.

Indeed, the Human Rights Campaign included the full definition in a reprint of an item from Gay City News. The article noted that Savage had donated $2,100 to the campaign of Santorum’s challenger in the 2006 election, Bob Casey, but Casey had not accepted the donation. According to the Scranton Times-Tribune, Casey returned the money after hearing of Savage’s promulgated definition of santorum, saying that Savage had gone “over the line” demarking political civility. Savage gave the money instead to an anti-Santorum political action committee.

Subsequently, Casey won the election. Although a California weekly suggested that the campaign’s “ripples were felt strongly by the outgoing senator himself in the recent midterm elections”, and Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle declared that “Dan Savage helped kill Rick Santorum”, Savage himself says “you can’t really measure impact.”

Read more

Note: Supporting footnotes were deleted from the preceding excerpt, which is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.