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Santorum: Traditional marriage is like a napkin, gay marriage is like a paper towel

Santorum: Traditional marriage is like a napkin, gay marriage is like a paper towel

As fictional character Forrest Gump once said, “Life is like a box of chocolates…”

And as (some would say, “fictional”) GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum says, “Marriage is like a napkin” … or is it like a glass of water, or a beer?

Rick Santorum

Santorum, on the campaign stump in Iowa Falls this week, extolled the virtues of traditional marriage — the importance of family, morality and religion — and told voters that calling gay marriage a marriage is like calling a napkin a paper towel.

“This is a napkin. I can call this napkin a paper towel, but it is a napkin,” Santorum declared at the local Hy-Vee grocery store.

“You can it whatever you want but it doesn’t change the character of what it is to the metaphysical,” he continued. “Now we can call it marriage but doesn’t make it marriage,” Santorum concluded, shaking the napkin in mid-air.

Santorum’s metaphors go beyond paper products. The former senator has also used a water versus beer analogy to make his point. In a video from the Des Moines Register posted on C-SPAN today, Santorum said marriage is like a glass of water, not beer.

“It’s like saying this glass of water is a glass of beer. Well, you can call it a glass of beer, but it’s not a glass of beer. It’s a glass of water. And water is what water is. Marriage is what marriage is,” said Santorum, who defines it as a union between a man and woman.

via: MSNBC

Santorum, who has compared gay marriage to bigamy, polygamy, and incest, said he supports a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

Santorum said he supports “great latitude for the states,” but there’s “a misunderstanding of the 10th amendment” and there should be limits to what a state can do — and according to Santorum, that limit is marriage equality.

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