Jennifer Rubin Hits Santorum with Quote Out of Context

February 15, 2012
Posted by Thomas Grace
WizBang:

Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s supposedly conservative blogger, takes Rick Santorum completely out of context for no other reason than to smack her favorite whipping boy, Senator Sweater Vest again. Here’s her lede:

Santorum: ‘Birth control harms women’
ByJennifer Rubin

Yesterday I speculated on some of the reasons Rick Santorum has problems with women voters. This interview from a few year back sure isn’t going to help

(youtube embedded video)

Santorum saying that ‘birth control harms women’ would be notable… Except that’s not what he said. I’m not going to embed the video for one specific reason. I want you to be able to really understand the quote in context. Here is both the QUESTION and his reply:

Interviewer Question: So would birth control be covered by that notion of freedom without responsibilities?

I vote and have supported birth control because it is not the taking of a human life but I am not a believer in birth control. -artificial birth control- Again I think it goes down the line of being able to do whatever you want to do without having the responsibility that comes with that. …

This is from a personal point of view, from a governmental point of view I support ahh, title 10 I guess it is, and have voted for contraception and although I don’t think it works, I think it’s harmful to women, I think it’s harmful to our society to have a society that says that sex outside of marriage is something that should be encouraged or or or tolerated particularly among the young.

I think it has… we’ve seen very, very harmful long term consequences to our society. Birth control enables that and I don’t think it is a healthy thing for our country.

Santorum was expressing what should be a pretty mainstream conservative belief, that sex without consequences, especially in the young outside of marriage harms society. And it’s hardly a radical idea, even Bill Clinton said he agrees with it. (insert your own joke)

That was the whole point of the question. And the answer. Yet this is how the ‘conservative’ blogger Jennifer Rubin continues after the video.

… The impression that Santorum finds the prevalent practice of birth control “harmful to women” is, frankly, mind-numbing. If he meant to focus on teen sexual promiscuity, he surely could have, and thereby might have sounded less out of touch.

It is obvious to any honest observer that is exactly what he was was focusing on. He only said it explicitly after all.

Likewise, he wasn’t saying that ‘birth control does not work’ either. He was saying allowing sex without consequences (as facilitated by birth control) did not work to make society better. Rubin is a professional wordsmith yet pretends she does not see this.

It’s bad enough that liberals are going to lie to smear Republican candidates, shouldn’t ‘conservative’ bloggers be a little more honest?