At GOP Debate Rick Santorum Talks Immigration, Same-Sex Marriage, Dred Scott, Gets It All Wrong

At tonight’s mini GOP debate, Rick Santorum called for treating everyone equally, but those words seem to have a different meaning for him.

Rick Santorum, answering a question about immigration, insisted that “our compassion is in our laws. And when we live by those laws and we treat everybody equally under the law, that’s when people feel good about being Americans.”

There’s nothing compassionate about tearing apart families by deporting one or both parents, and there’s nothing compassionate about sending them back to countries from which they are seeking asylum, countries like Honduras, which is literally the murder capital of the world.

However, Santorum, also during tonight’s debate, sang a very different tune a few minutes earlier when speaking about the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision.

“Recently the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on same-sex marriage. Is that now settled law in America today?,” Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked.

“It is not any more than Dred Scott was settled law to Abraham Lincoln,” Santorum claimed, adding that Dred Scott was passed by a “rogue Supreme Court.” 

WATCH: At Debate Gov. Jindal Pledges To Sign Executive Order Specifically Protecting ‘Christians’ From Gays

Santorum then also called the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision a “rogue Supreme Court decision, just like Justice Roberts said. There is no constitutional basis for the Supreme Court’s decision, and I know something about this.”

So, when we “treat everybody equally under the law, that’s when people feel good about being Americans,” Santorum claims, unless he is opposed to the law, then it’s a “rogue Supreme Court decision” that should be ignored.

Huffington Post reporter Julia Craven observes that the “Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott’s case determined that black people were property and not, nor ever could be, U.S. citizens,” and notes that the Dred Scott decision has “nothing” to do with marriage equality.

“Conservatives maintain that, just as Lincoln ultimately overturned the decision in the Dred Scott case, they will overturn legalized gay marriage,” Craven writes. “But there’s a lot of false equivalence floating around. It’s insulting to invoke America’s history of legal racism to explain why states should be allowed to discriminate against same-sex couples (many of which include people of color, incidentally).”

  

Image: Screenshot via Kay Steiger/YouTube
Hat tip: ThinkProgress