No politician more consistently makes me yell at my radio than Rick Santorum. Every time I hear him frothing at the ass mouth, I fly into an apoplectic rage which can only be vented by abusing the poor inanimate device that channeled his spew into my house. Now that he's come within a devil's whisker of winning the Iowa caucus, it's worth reminding ourselves that—just as we must remind ourselves that Newt Gingrich is crazy, and that Mitt Romney is a shapeshifter—that Rick Santorum is evil.

I'll say it again. Santorum is evil.

It's not just his determination to further cripple America's technological future by degrading our science curricula with more creationism. It's his insistence that morality can only be learned from an ancient, irrelevant book, and that rational thought can only lead us into disaster. It's the dangerous belief that we can do whatever we damn well please to the planet and it's all fine because Jesus will be coming soon anyway to establish his kingdom and roll the earth up like a happy scroll, so we may as well just go ahead and enshrine our Christian extremism in the Constitution.

And it's not just his frothing, kneejerk hatred of homosexuality. It's his desire to use America's irrational fear of gay sex to wedge his way into your home and your bedroom, to legislate against any type of consensual sex that makes him uncomfortable and even to roll back your right to contraception.

Make no mistake. Santorum's fight against gay rights is the opening salvo in a war on all pleasure, gay, straight, sexual, or otherwise—the opening salvo in a war on privacy itself. There's a reason, after all, that it was Santorum and not some other right-wingnut who was chosen by Dan Savage as the beneficiary of a hostile redefinition of his surname. It's because Rick Santorum is evil, and is a deadly danger to far more than just gay people. If he becomes president, he'll make George Bush look like a Unitarian.

After hearing him interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition back in 2005, I was so offended by his assertions that atheism leads to immorality that I had to vent my bile to the world at large. I said then, in part, in an open rant to Santorum:

Compassion and tolerance are so much more important when life on this tiny rock is the only life we'll ever have, but your only idea of compassion is to force the 14-year-old girls you've rendered ignorant into bringing more hungry, poverty-stricken babies into the world, and your only idea of tolerance is to slither your way into one of the most powerful posts in American government and then whinge endlessly about how so-called Christians like you aren't allowed a place in the public discourse. I may not believe in God, but I do believe in evil, and you're its simpering mug.  [read more]

Well, if his educational standards should become the norm, we sure will be.

Now that Christmas is over, let's talk about miracles.

Miracles have been on my mind since last week when I heard the story of Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk-Algonquin woman whom the Vatican plans to canonize. The miracle that sealed her canonization was 5-year-old Jake Finkbonner's 2006 recovery from the flesh-eating bacterium Strep A. His chest, neck, face, and scalp were infected, but a Blessed Kateri relic and prayers to the long-dead woman supposedly halted the progress of the infection before it reached his eyes, brain, or heart.

Jake's recovery is wonderful, perhaps even remarkable, but is it a miracle? We tend to use the word miracle in two different senses without always making much of a distinction between them. Sometimes we mean an occurrence has come to pass that was simply quite unlikely. In this case, miracle is nothing more than a hyperbolic turn of phrase. But often we mean an occurrence that could only have come to pass through some kind of supernatural or divine intervention.

The miraculous waters are only muddied by the frequency with which the word gets tossed around in the news. A game-winning three-point shot from half-court at the buzzer and other impressive athletic feats get the same tag as the 10-year-old Dutch boy who survives a plane crash that kills all 103 other people on board.

But are any of these occurrences more than rhetorical miracles? We know that, under the right circumstances, some people can survive plane crashes. We know that, with the right combination of skill, training, and luck, improbable last-minute field goals can happen. We know that internal diseases can be halted or cured, even if we don't always understand the precise mechanisms that bring this about. These and other seeimingly remarkable occurrences are things that we learn through our experience in, observation of, and interaction with the world are, in fact, possible.

When we sit at the bedside of a cancer-afflicted loved one and pray for God to send a cure, we know that a cure really is possible. But imagine sitting at the bedside of a loved one whose leg has been severed in an accident. Would any of us pray to God for the leg to regrow or be restored without surgical intervention and seriously expect that prayer to be answered? No, because we know through our experience of the world that limbs do not spontaneously regenerate. We don't even think about the possibility that God would provide such a miracle.

Which is odd. Our expectation of what God can miraculously accomplish is confined entirely to the realm of the possible. What we know is flatly impossible doesn't even enter into our thinking.

A miracle would be 104 out of 104 passengers surviving a horrific plane crash without a scratch. A miracle would be a priest sticking someone's severed leg back to the stump and having it reattach itself. Surely these feats would not be beyond an omnipotent God who traffics in the otherwise impossible. But no, what we consider to be miracles really aren't, and what would be true miracles don't lie within the realms of our expectations or even our imaginations.

Even young Jake Finkbonner, cured by a miraculous relic, seems to have that innate understanding of what is actually possible and what isn't. He says he wants to help other kids when he grows up. Does that mean he wants to be a priest? A saint?

No. He says he wants to be a doctor.

Fuck you, you dissembling fuck. I heard you this morning on Morning Edition just as I was leaving for work, bloviating about how the reason the question of where our species came from is important is because if it was just random chance then there's no necessity for morality. Let me tell you, sir, that the atheists and evolutionists—not necessarily equivalent sets, mind you—I know have more morality in their fingernail trimmings than you have anywhere within a ten-meter radius of your wizened little heart. Small-minded, bigoted twits like you may not be able to envision a reason to treat each other well absent some authoritarian patriarch in the sky, but that's only because you can't even bring yourself to treat others well after your professed pal J.C. set the example. Compassion and tolerance are so much more important when life on this tiny rock is the only life we'll ever have, but your only idea of compassion is to force the 14-year-old girls you've rendered ignorant into bringing more hungry, poverty-stricken babies into the world, and your only idea of tolerance is to slither your way into one of the most powerful posts in American government and then whinge endlessly about how so-called Christians like you aren't allowed a place in the public discourse. I may not believe in God, but I do believe in evil, and you're its simpering mug. Eat primordial soup and die, but I mean that in only the most compassionate way. Fucker.