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Photo: Gage SkidmoreRick Santorum isn’t just a climate denier — he’s a contraception denier. He believes contraception exists, but he apparently wishes it didn’t, and he’s eying ways to deny you access to it.

No, we’re not talking about abortion here, though of course he wants to deny you access to that too. We’re talking basic contraception — the Pill, condoms, all the stuff that more than 99 percent of American women (and some smart men) use to prevent pregnancy and STDs.

Get a load of this, from an interview Santorum gave in October 2011:

One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, well, that’s OK, contraception is OK. It’s not OK. It’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage. They’re supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal … but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen.

So, of course, Santorum wants to eliminate federal funding for contraception. That’s a big f*cking deal — literally. In 2006, publicly funded family-planning services prevented 1.94 million unintended pregnancies. Government-supported family-planning clinics save taxpayers $3.74 for every $1 that is spent providing contraceptive care, according to the Guttmacher Institute [PDF]. So much for Santorum’s claim to be a deficit hawk (though we already have plenty of evidence that he doesn’t really mean it).

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And, of course, Santorum wants to entirely roll back the health-care law Obama signed in 2010, which means rolling back the forthcoming rule change that would require insurance companies to cover the full cost of prescription birth control and stop charging women hefty co-pays every month.

On Friday in New Hampshire, he tried to present himself as a little less draconian: “I would not vote — and I’ve said this repeatedly — that I would not vote for banning contraception,” he said.

But he’d be fine with other people voting to ban contraception. Santorum has said he supports a state’s right to ban birth control, and he has explicitly stated his opposition to the landmark 1965 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Connecticut ban on contraception.

And just for good measure, Santorum signed a right-wing marriage pledge calling for “robust childbearing and reproduction” — by the right kinds of people, that is.

Santorum’s views on reproductive rights are so backward, so troglodytic, that they make right-wing radicals look moderate. Santorum is Catholic, but his positions aren’t mainstream in the Catholic community. Despite admonishments from up the hierarchy, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use modern contraception. Santorum is proving popular among evangelicals, but his positions aren’t mainstream in the evangelical community. Seventy-eight percent of married evangelical women use so-called “highly effective contraceptive methods,” including the Pill or other hormonal methods, an IUD, or sterilization, according to a Guttmacher study [PDF]; in fact, evangelicals are more likely to get sterilized than other Americans.

Just about the only community in which Santorum’s views are mainstream is the Duggar family — sure, it’s just one family, but it’s a really big family. If all 19 of those kids could have voted in Iowa’s caucuses, Santorum would have won.

A last word from fucknoricksantorum.tumblr.com: