Picking on George III: Santorum's Turn

American Republican "conservatives" sure are determined to lose that crucial monarchist vote. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum may have their differences, but they both apparently think it clever to bash Barack Obama by likening him to King George III. (Or possibly a "rock star," which I guess is sort of the same thing?) Santorum's anti-royalist rant apparently struck a chord with his audience, though, providing one more indication of why I will probably always feel like an alien here. Personally I would much prefer George III to either Obama or any of his rivals! (Some of Santorum's left-liberal critics fear he will "bring us all back to the 14th century"...if only!)

The painful truth for American monarchists is that in a perverse sense Santorum is right: the USA really is founded on hatred of George III and the belief that it is somehow special and better than any other nation. What ought to be clear to American Christians however is that Rick Santorum, though both admired and reviled for his allegedly staunch Catholicism, is the epitome of the Americanist Catholic whose effect has been to Americanize Catholicism rather than to Catholicize America, whether he would see it that way or not. He follows in the disgraceful tradition of Archbishop John Ireland (who traveled to France to inform French Catholics that the persecution of the Church there was their own fault for having supported the monarchy) and Cardinal James Gibbons (who assured President Wilson that American Catholics would back him in destroying the ancient Catholic Habsburg monarchy).

Santorum and his ilk have thoroughly repudiated the European ideal of Christendom, and swallowed the profoundly anti-Catholic (and anti-Anglican) Enlightenment mythology of the Freemasonic United States of America hook, line, and sinker. His concept of nationality is defined not by any particular culture or [traditional] creed, but by some kind of mystical "DNA" of "Freedom" which somehow elevates Americans above all other peoples in the world, without any explanation of how a purely scientific concept such as DNA could have anything to do with "Freedom," or how it is that some Americans (presumably, those who disagree with Rick Santorum) are missing this mysterious "Freedom Gene." Those who congratulate themselves on their "reason" for having rejected the allegedly superstitious doctrines of Christianity might want to ask themselves how this religion, though flowing naturally from the lies and errors of 1776, is any more "rational." Those who do consider themselves Christians might want to ask themselves if the two religions are really compatible.