Republican presidential candidate Rick
Santorum claimed Sunday that the Supreme Court damaged the
institution of marriage when it ruled that gay couples have a
constitutional right to marry in all 50 states.
Appearing on CBS's Face the Nation,
Santorum was asked to expand on comments that the ruling potentially
“disrupts the foundation of the world.”
Santorum answered that “when we
subordinate the rights of the people to nine unelected judges, we can
no longer be called a democracy.”
“And what the court did here as
Justice Roberts said, was – there's no constitutional basis for
what they did. They simply just acted out of, as one said, a whim.
That's not how a democracy functions. That's not how a republic
functions.”
The ruling is “a huge infringement on
the foundational right that we have which is the First Amendment”
and “it's really a further erosion of the foundational building
block of society, which is the nuclear family.”
“And this goes further – I mean,
over the last 40 years, we've seen a degradation of the nuclear
family, no doubt about it. But this further, I say, put the nail in
the coffin that we now disconnect the nuclear family from the idea
that [marriage is] there for the purpose of having and raising
children.”
“Marriage no longer about kids. It's
simply about adults. And I think that – now that United States is
a – it's still the moral leader of the world, that we've now
disconnected marriage from children, I think that has profound
consequences for not just for America but for the world.”