YOU HAVE to feel slightly sorry for a an anti-gay, "family values" politician whose last name has been turned by the Internet into slang for "the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex."
But former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum seems to delight in going out of his way to justify the ridicule that he's routinely subjected to.
The arch-conservative, who once compared legalizing same-sex marriage to opening a door to pedophilia and bestiality, is currently running for the Republican nomination for president (although he has little chance of getting it). The campaign slogan he chose was "Fighting to Make America America Again"--whatever that means--and has been prominently splashed cross his website and other campaign materials.
It turns out, of course, that "Let America Be America Again" is the title of a poem by African American poet Langston Hughes--who was not only a committed leftist, but was also gay.
It took Lee Fang of Think Progress to ask the former senator why he would choose such a slogan.
Fang asked, "But was it intentional that this line was borrowed from the pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes?" Santorum responded that he had nothing to do with the slogan and, "The folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that that's where it came from, if in fact it came from that."
When Fang asked, "Do you like Langston Hughes? Is he a favorite poet?," the candidate quickly replied, "I've read some of his poems. I'm not a big poetry guy so I can't say I have a favorite poet, sorry."
It's a pretty safe bet that Santorum has never read "Let America Be America Again." The poem is a cry for freedom for the oppressed and a rebellion against politicians like Santorum who revel in "false patriotism" and notions of "freedom" that have never applied to African Americans and other minorities.
It includes the lines:
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
