Santorum: If marriage is for people who ‘love,’ why limit it ‘to just two people? Why not 10?’

by Peter Baklinski

CARROLL, Iowa, August 29, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - If two people should be allowed to get married simply because they “love” one another, then why limit marriage “to just two people?” asked Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum in a recent interview. “Why not three people? Why not 10 people?  […] Why not [allow] nieces and aunts to marry?”

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

The former senator was responding to the arguments of gay “marriage” advocates, who say two people of the same sex who are in love should be allowed to “marry.”

“If marriage means ‘anyone who is in love,’ well, then, let everybody who is in love get married,” added the senator wryly.

Santorum made the remarks during an interview with Douglas Burns, co-publisher of The Carroll Daily Times Herald, last Thursday, August 25th.

Burns grilled the presidential candidate on his views about homosexual “marriage,” asking him, “How does the fact that there are a handful of gay couples married in Carroll [Iowa] affect my heterosexual life and your heterosexual life?”

“Because it changes the definition of an intrinsic element of society in a way that minimizes what that bond means to society,” retorted Santorum.

“Marriage is what marriage is. Marriage was around before government said what it was.”

The presidential candidate outlined a clear definition of marriage, saying that it is exclusively a “union between a man and a woman […] for the purposes of having and rearing children and for the benefit of both the man and the woman involved in that relationship.”

Santorum argued that marriage is an “intrinsic value to society” because it creates “stable families of men and woman bonded together to raise children.”

“Young children are being indoctrinated as to what normal is.”

He also argued that homosexual “marriage” “will have a huge impact on people’s religious freedom,” criticizing the practice in some states where “licenses [are refused] for adoptions to organizations that won’t do gay adoptions.”

Santorum pointed out that there is a conflict between the direction that the American legal system has taken by creating homosexual “marriage” and the collective morality of what the American public want.

With gay “marriage,” “we’ve created something that is not what it is. It’s coercion […] and that’s what I’ve been fighting.”