Former Pennsylvania senator and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum attended the March for Marriage in Washington D.C. today and gave an interview with TownHall in which he blamed the current state of the economy on the increasing national acceptance of gay marriage.

Marriage is not, Santorum said, solely about “a romantic relationship between two people.”

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“It’s also about,” he added, “a unity of men and women, for the purposes of having and raising children, and giving the child their birthright, which is to be raised by their natural mother and natural father. When we have less of that in America — then society struggles and suffers. Economically, it suffers; socially, it suffers; morally, it suffers — and children are harmed.”

The result of “a decline in marriage and a redefinition of marriage,” he said, is that “you get less marriage. You get families that aren’t as strong, and as a result, society generally, the economy suffers.”

He then defined every family “as an economic unit, and the family breaks apart because we are saying that marriage is not significant…It’s important for us to stand up for what is best for children, what’s best for society, what’s best for the economy, and make that case.”

Watch the entire interview with Santorum below.

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[Image via AFP]