Rick Santorum isn't going away, having won at the polls in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado on Tuesday night. That means Santorum has now won more states than Mitt Romney.
Santorum won the first contest of the primary season in Iowa but had finished in the bottom of the field in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Nevada despite strong support from the evangelical wing of the Republican Party.
In a speech celebrating his wins, as called by the networks, Santorum railed against government intervention in the everyday lives of Americans. And to do that, he flipped on its head an argument he normally uses to deny LGBT Americans equal rights.
"Unlike when God gives you rights, the government can take them away," he warned listeners.
He said Obama had overreached, for example, on health care and created a right where one did not exist.
Santorum has said numerous times that he doesn't consider same-sex marriage or adoption one of those God-given rights, and he claims it's up to the government whether to grant these to LGBT people. While on the campaign trail in Florida, he used this belief in God-given rights versus government rights to explain to a mother why her gay son doesn't deserve the same rights as him.
"Every American child has the right, and the government should support the right, to have and know their mother and father and be raised by their mother and father," he said in January, according to the Palm Beach Post.
Santorum said that while God has granted everyone some rights, the government has control over what's leftover and issues those "privileges" to people who are "healthy for society."
"There are certain things that government does that gives people privileges in order to promote activity that are healthy for society and are best for society," he said, according to the Post. "And those things we promote would give people advantages or benefits, government benefits because we think that is healthy activity."
Santorum didn't mention that half of his philosophy during his speech on Tuesday, but gay rights activists tried their best to remind people of the candidate's antigay views with yet another glitter-bombing at a campaign event in Minnesota earlier today.
There were a few other things that went mostly unmentioned by Santorum on Tuesday, too. One of his main rivals, Newt Gingrich, wasn't on the ballot in Missouri. And in all three of Tuesday night's contests, no delegates are being awarded due to party rules that assign that power to conventions and other processes not bound by the outcome at Tuesday's polls.
