Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum Will Not Recognize Gay Marriages, Even if They’re Legal

By Alison Lesley --
23 Jun 2015 --

Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum says he will not legalize gay marriage and will go against the ruling by the Supreme Court, stating it is a violation of the First Amendment.

If Rick Santorum is elected president, he will not enforce any ruling by the Supreme Court that legalizes gay marriage.

Recently, Santorum called into Glen Beck’s radio show to make his claims public. He said that the Supreme Court striking down gay marriage bans is “tantamount to government establishing religion.”

Santorum went on to say that a ruling such as this by the highest court in the land would essentially mean the government can tell religious groups what to believe and how they can believe it. He said that this is in clear violation of the “Establishment Clause in the Constitution.”

Both Glen Beck and Rick Santorum forecasted a similar sequence of events should the Supreme Court rule in this way. Beck, citing the work of historian David Barton, said the government would remove tax-exempt status from the churches and force churches to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies.

Santorum said that “the left” will not stop at “mere tolerance,” but instead will “demand conformity,” not only from churches, but all institutions. He went on to say that there would be “no tolerance [by the government] to a different point of view on this issue.”

The comments made not only by Santorum, but by Beck and Barton as well, have elicited a strong response from proponents of gay marriage. Perhaps the strongest among them is that a Supreme Court ruling cannot be unconstitutional because they are charged with interpreting the Constitution, so what they rule is, by definition, constitutional, Hrafnkell Haraldsson wrote for politicususa.com.

Santorum’s opponents from the left also state that marriage, and hence gay marriage, is not a religion, so the discussion has nothing to do with the First Amendment.

https://twitter.com/Aschwin__/status/605364497092603904

But it does not sound like a future President Rick Santorum would be shaken. “If they get it wrong and the consequences are what I suspect they will be toward people of faith,” he said, “then this president will fight back.”