Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has
labeled Dan Savage's comments on 'Bill Maher' filth.
On Friday's edition of HBO's Real
Time with Bill Maher, Savage, a sex advice columnist, took broad
swipes at Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and Santorum, the two most
anti-gay candidates in the GOP 2012 presidential field.
On the topic of recent allegations that
the Christian counseling center run by Michele Bachmann's husband,
Marcus, seeks to “cure” gay people, Savage said: “You can't
pray away the gay, but you can torture a conflicted closet case to
death.”
And when comic Marc Maron said he hopes
Mr. Bachmann “takes all that rage that comes from repression and
denial into the bedroom with her … and I hope he fucks her angrily,
because that's how I would,” Savage took a swipe at Santorum: “I
sometimes think about fucking the shit out of Rick Santorum … I'm
up for whipping up some santorum in Santorum.” (The video is
embedded in the right panel of this page.)
Savage was referring to the new
definition of “santorum” which he helped coin, often called
Santorum's Google problem because even after nearly eight years it
continues to rank high on the search engine's results. The
definition links Santorum to anal sex.
Santorum appeared Monday on WOR radio's
Steve Malzberg show.
“It's filth,” Santorum
said of Savage's jokes. “It's, you know, this man has gone out
there and tried to destroy my integrity. I mean, you've heard the
whole issue of the Google issue. That's Dan Savage. You know, it's
the lowest debasement of public discourse. It's offensive beyond,
you know, anything that any public figure in America should tolerate,
and the mainstream media laughs about it. They kid about it. They
write about it. They say, 'Oh, Santorum has a Google problem.'”
The former Pennsylvania senator added
that Savage was out to “intimidate” him.
“[T]his is about intimidation,” he
said. “To ultimately see this is about intimidating anybody who
stands up against them. You stand up against them, they will
intimidate you, they will use vile things, and the media will applaud
them, and you will be ostracized in society. That's their
objective.”
Santorum neglected to mention he
started the feud in 2003 when he likened gay unions to “man on
dog.”