HANDLE’S GORGE, PENNSYLVANIA — At a campaign stop in his home state of Pennsylvania, 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum continued his recent trend of admonishing famous people for the topics they speak about. Recently, Santorum made headlines when he chastised the Pope for speaking out about climate change. Santorum, a devout Catholic himself, said that Pope Francis would be “better off leaving science to the scientists” and should be worried only about what he says the church is good at — “theology and morality.”
“I like the fact that Pope Frank is still so totes anti-gay, that feels good. That’s what the church should be doing — repressing people based on archaic and stupid arbitrary guidelines of sexual morality,” Santorum told reporters recently. “But whenever he wades into territory that the church should stay out of — pretty much anything that isn’t judging people for who they are and stuff — he goes off track in my estimation. I like my be-hatted pontiffs to be focused on buttsex, not whether the planet is going to kill us all off for being such destructive assholes.”
Just days after Santorum admonished Pope Francis — who holds a degree in Chemistry — for discussing scientific issues, he went after another celebrity: Oscar the Grouch. The green-furred Muppet who resides in Sesame Street’s only trash can ran afoul of Santorum for shooting a series of public service announcement commercials on the subjects of littering, garbage, and recycling. The PSAs were aimed at raising awareness among young children for proper waste management, but Santorum felt they were a bridge to “cultural Marxism.”
“Who is Oscar the Grouch to tell us about garbage-related things,” asked Santorum of the crowd assembled at the local Hardee’s in Handle’s Gorge, Pennsylvania. “Just because he has lived for for decades in a trash can, he thinks he can speak about trash and trash-related subjects? He should stick to the things he does best,” the former Republican Senator said. “He should be teaching our kids their A-B-C’s, 1-2-3’s, and the only science he should be teaching kids is the truth — that God personally made this planet we live on just over 6,000 years ago and that mankind walked with dinosaurs.”
Santorum told his audience that he is “unimpressed” with Mr. The Grouch’s credentials. “So, what, the next thing you’ll tell me is that someone who spends 24 hours a day playing guitar would become proficient at it? Are you telling me that just because you spend years studying something intensely, soaking in all the available knowledge you can on a subject, that you somehow have some kind of valid perspective on it,” Santorum demanded from the crowd.
“Celebrities and people in power need to be very careful what they say,” Mr. Santorum said at one point. “You can’t flame the fires of controversy just because 97% of publishing scientists agree that something is real. You can’t just go around pontificating about something just because all data and common sense tell you something is happening. Pope Frank needs to stick to the Bible, and Oscar needs to stick to the basics of child education that the Children’s Television Workshop hired him for!”
After the campaign rally, reporters caught up to Santorum and asked him why he feels that Pope Francis shouldn’t weigh-in on climate change, but that it was totally acceptable for him to do so, despite not having any degree in any scientific field. “Nice gotcha question, pal,” Santorum said. “You just don’t get it, do you? The science isn’t settled just because 97 out of 100 scientists say it is. What about that three percent? I’m just standing up for the right of that three percent of scientists — likely in a medically induced coma or perhaps dead and not even realizing it — to have their voices be heard,” he went on to say.
“I’ve said all along I’m not scientist, so I leave it up to the 3% of scientists who agree with my clear and obvious political agenda to tell me about sciencey stuff. That doesn’t mean I won’t call global climate the hoax that it is though,” Santorum said. “Because after all, at the end of it all, I’m an evangelical Christian conservative. Being hypocritical about shit and never fessing up to my hypocrisies is just how I roll. God Bless you all. But more importantly, God bless my campaign!”
