Talk about spreading the word. Roll Call has gotten comment from former senator and potential presidential candidate Rick Santorum, regarding the trouble he can have from people searching for his name on Google, only to run into the invented obscene term created by sex columnist Dan Savage.
Back in 2003, Santorum warned of terrible consequences from the legalization of sexual relations between gays, in the then-pending Supreme Court case of Lawrence v. Texas: “And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.”
Savage, who is gay, set out to ridicule Santorum by creating a new word, “santorum,” to be given a prurient definition by submissions and a final poll among his readers. We will not print out exactly what “santorum” is on this site, but a reader can find it very easily through a Google search.
And that’s just the problem for the former senator.
Thanks to early and intense Google-bombing by Savage and his readers, searching for “santorum” brings up the official web site for Savage’s campaign as the first result. When searching for “Rick Santorum,” the neologism’s Wikipedia page is the second result, and the official page the third result. And of course, none of this will help a politician with low name recognition.
So Roll Call sought Santorum’s take on it:
Santorum himself sounded slightly defeated when asked about it recently.
“It’s one guy. You know who it is. The Internet allows for this type of vulgarity to circulate. It’s unfortunate that we have someone who obviously has some issues. But he has an opportunity to speak,” Santorum told Roll Call.
…
Santorum, meanwhile, suggested a double standard, especially in what appears to be a new era of civility in the wake of the Arizona shootings.
“It’s just a sad commentary,” he told Roll Call. “You want to talk about incivility. I don’t know of anybody on the left who came to my defense for the incivility with respect to those things.”
Santorum ally David Urban argued to the paper that the ex-senator could turn this into an advantage: “If you’re Rick Santorum and you’re making an argument that there’s certain people that wish you ill, there’s exhibit No. 1. You say: ‘You want to see my battle scars? Google my name. You don’t think I’ve been in the trenches for years? I’ve got the scars to prove it.'”
