Rick Santorum disowns Langston Hughes line used in presidential campaign

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Guardian

Rick Santorum disowns Langston Hughes line used in presidential campaign
Anti-gay Republican has distanced himself from his website's slogan, which seems to derive from poet widely believed to be gay
Alison Flood guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 April 2011 17.15 BST

Eight years after Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum compared homosexuality to incest, a phrase from a poem by Langston Hughes, an author widely believed to be gay, has somehow ended up as his campaign slogan.

Emblazoned on Santorum's website is the phrase "Fighting to make America America again", a line that bears a striking similarity to Hughes's well-known poem "Let America be America again". But, asked by left-wing website ThinkProgress if he borrowed the line "from the pro-union poem by the gay poet", Santorum backed away from the phrase.

"I had nothing to do with that," he told ThinkProgress, which asked him if the similarity was just a coincidence. "I didn't know that. 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," he said. "I've read some of poems. I'm not a big poetry guy so I can't say I have a favourite poet, sorry."

~snip~
But Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator much loved by America's religious right, is far less keen to associate himself with Hughes. Asked again what the campaign slogan "Fighting to make America America again" meant to him, he said "well, I'm not too sure that's my campaign slogan, I think it's on a website".



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/18/langston-hughes-rick-santorum

[onehandle]

1. Too late. Guilt by association. Rick Santorum is gay. nt

[dadzilla]

3. Just look how much he protests...

He may not be a self loathing gay man, but he sure fits the pattern.

[Webster Green]

4. Yeah he is.

He's into doing it with male dogs.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

9. If we're being technical, he's a black gay socialist. nt

[EFerrari]

13. That's IT! I want to see his birth certificate!

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

14. "This story is gonna be yiuge yiugeee I tell ya'". nt

[BumRushDaShow]

2. So "his" campaign slogan was not meant to be a factual statement?

:rofl:

[The Wielding Truth]

5. Exactly. Oh, he's such a Republican.... hahahaha

[ladywnch]

6. nothing a rethug says it to be taken as a factual statement.... they

just don't believe in them.

[jwirr]

7. He is going to miss some great literature and music as well as other

things if he is going to distance himself from everything created by someone who is gay. He is an idiot in more ways than one.

[driver8]

8. What a douche...

I hate these people.

[patrice]

10. Not a big poetry guy. Of course not, he has his church too determine that kind of stuff

for him. Why would he go back to the tree from which those kinds of perceptions came? He has someone else to tell him.

[cliffordu]

11. That Frothy Mix is a wily bastid, ain't he???

:rofl:

[EC]

12. Maybe his ad guys don't like him...

And this was a wry way to get at him...

[plumbob]

15. This dumb bastard made it through Penn State and University of Pitt

without ever reading Langston Hughes?

Really?

Texas Tech University requires it, ffs....

[InkAddict]

16. I'm Rick Santorum and I did not approve that message,

Though it sure sounded better than Rockin' Your Soul in the Man-Boobs of Abraham."

[alp227]

17. what a silly, ignorant bigot. n/t

[tonekat]

18. Too Late Santorum, you recited the magic words

Poof! You're gay now. That's how it works you know.

[LeftishBrit]

19. Not only was Hughes gay; he was left-wing. And, of course, black.