Rick Santorum found a new hate last week: John F. Kennedy. JFK made him want to vomit, Santorum told a crowd, when he made a much-quoted speech celebrating the separation of church and state in American politics.
Mr. Santorum was two years old when JFK won the presidency in 1960. Children age 2 and under do a lot of vomiting, with or without the provocation of radical politicians such as Kennedy.
When I read Santorum’s vulgar personal comment, it brought back memories. While Santorum was throwing up in his swaddling clothes, our family was living in Bowie, Tex., where I published the Bowie News, a weekly newspaper. The campaign of 1960 remains vivid in my memory.
Bowie was a Southern Baptist town. There was no Catholic Church there. There were no Republicans there, either. Bowie was as southern Democrat as it was Southern Baptist. And therein lay a challenge. The nation’s Democrats had nominated Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, to run for president.
What were the Bowie Baptist/Democrats to do? A good number of them — particularly the noisy ones — were convinced to the point of apoplexy — that a President John F. Kennedy would get his orders straight from the Vatican. And that was about the kindest thing they had to say about the man and his religion.
At that time in my political life, I was a Nelson Rockefeller Republican (now an extinct species), who would vote for Richard Nixon. I also made an effort to avoid basing my judgments on race, religion or previous condition of servitude and wrote editorials stating Catholics were people, just as Baptists were, and should be judged by what they did and what they said rather than where they went to church.
It took a full year to win back the friends — and advertising revenue — I lost with those remarks.
Now back to Mr. Santorum’s nausea. Since he was only 2 at the time, it is not surprising he doesn’t understand why JFK worked so hard to assure Southern Baptists and the rest of the American people that he would not be governed by the Pope in Rome if he were to be elected president. He believed, you see, in the separation of church and state.
Making that promise, and that distinction, was imperative to his campaign. He was, he said over and over again, an American first. He would be guided by the U.S. Constitution and the interests of the American people, not by the officials of his church, he promised, and he laid out those promises and the philosophy which were their foundation, in the eloquent speech that so sickens Mr. Santorum half a century later. It is probable that his careful reasoning and soaring rhetoric made the difference to an appreciable number of thinking Southerners when it came time for them to cast their ballots.
HOW ANYONE can witness Sunnis killing Shiites in Iraq and Afghans murdering U.S. officers over the burning of Korans and not be doubly convinced that our tradition of separating church and state is both wise and necessary escapes me.
Mr. Santorum, himself, argues for it with his words and actions. When he disagreed with Mitt Romney over a philosophical point, he immediately snapped that Romney’s religion was “phony.”
Were he president, what would he do to drive “phony religion” — i.e., thoughts with which he disagreed — from the capital? Let us pray that we do not learn the answer to this question.
It is, come to think of it, remarkable this argument must be had all over again in this year of our Lord, 2012.
It’s enough to make a guy urp.
