Rick Santorum

(Warning: This entry talks about some pretty gross stuff.  If you don’t want to be exposed to it, you may be better off just skipping this whole entry.)

A number of people are currently running to be the Republican nominee for president in 2012.  One of them is former senator Rick Santorum.

Santorum is a fiscal conservative and a foreign-policy conservative, but what’s really “politically incorrect” nowadays is that he’s also a social conservative.  He is strongly against homosexuality, for example. 

That’s why, starting in 2003, a number of homosexuals and other liberals lashed out at him with a “Google bomb” campaign, linking the senator’s name to a Web site they created and a really below-the-belt made-up definition of “santorum”.  I don’t suppose it bears repeating the definition here, but you’ll find it if you want to—all you have to do is search for his name.  You can read all about this sequence of events from the Daily Caller, Roll Call, or the New Hampshire Concord Monitor.

An obvious point to make here is how vicious liberals sometimes are to conservatives (while we’re on the subject).  I’m sure no one has ever done anything like this to a liberal senator—in fact, it’s difficult for me to imagine that conservatives ever could:  There might be a few conservatives who could stomach doing something like this, but not nearly the numbers required to pull it off.  In a way, this Google bomb campaign is even intrinsically liberal, in its nature—think about it, what could a conservative equivalent look like? deviously linking search terms like “Anthony Weiner” or “Barney Frank” to a squeaky-clean Web site about strong moral fiber?

A less obvious point is that an unintended side effect of this campaign may be to give people a less favorable opinion of homosexuality—not just because it implies that homosexuals are vindictive and degenerate, but because it invites us to contemplate some of the concrete details of what homosexuality means:  It means, among other things—if you’ll pardon the graphic details—one man putting his penis through another man’s anus, into the end of his large intestine, which (not to put too fine a point on it) is where feces come from.  Or, as someone once put it, “some men . . . want to use each others’ digestive tract as a sex toy”.

That’s naturally, inherently repulsive.  I suppose that habitual homosexuals get used to it, as people get used to anything habitual—as an alcoholic, for example, gets used to being homeless and unshaven and stinking; it’s part of the price of his chosen vice.  But the rest of us don’t have to get used to it.  I wonder whether homosexuality would be as popularly liked as it is in America today if liberals thought of it a little less in terms of airy abstractions—of being “in love” and, perhaps especially, of “rights”—and a little more in terms of concrete practices.

This long-standing “Google bomb”, like some grotesque monument, invites us to do so, to walk around it and meditate on what homosexuality is.  It’s an ugly thing to think about.  The vulgar Web site has certainly lowered my opinion of homosexuality.

Anyway I support Rick Santorum, and I think you should, too.  The algorithms of Google and other search engines are somewhat mysterious (intentionally so—they don’t want to make it easy to run a Google-bombing campaign), but it seems that, generally speaking, the more different Web sites link to Santorum’s real site, using his name (Rick Santorum or Santorum) as the link anchor, the higher its rank is likely to rise in searches for those terms.