Rick Santorum discusses Obama and abortion, awkwardly.

For those who can't view the video, the offending statement is this:

 "The question is -- and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer -- is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no. Well if that person -- human life is not a person, then -- I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'we're going to decide who are people and who are not people.'"

"That human life" referring to a fetus. In other words, because, as an African-American, President Obama may have the experience of being marginalized or treated as "less than"--he should entirely understand...what it's like....to be a fetus?

Just between us ex-fetuses, that's a really weird way of looking at things. For one thing, Santorum is implying that there's an equivalency between the institutionalized marginalization of black people--who possess the agency to be very aware of the discrimination against them, with fetuses, who simply don't. But the other thing is, the way it comes out of Santorum's mouth sounds suspiciously like, "I know better than Barack Obama how and what he should think." And that of course is, well, more marginalizing.

Notice also that Santorum's argument altogether disappears the agency of the women whose bodies might actually harbor the fetuses that he means to impute personhood to. Curiously, if they even are treated as persons, their personhood has to be subordinated to that of the entity they carry. It seems like Rick Santorum, himself, is very comfortable determining who is and isn't a person, and to what degree.

Later in the interview, he goes on to discuss why gay people should not be able to marry and raise children, even if those things are natural enough for other (straight) people to do.

So just to recap what Rick Santorum's point of view seems to be: President Obama needs to be told what to think, women may or may not be persons depending upon whether they have fetuses inside them or not, and gays should not be treated like they are fully persons if they want to do "unnatural" things like marry someone they love and raise children with them. But don't forget that a clump of opinionless, unaware cells are so the equal of anyone in the personhood department!

It is altogether possible this awkward-thinking person will run in the GOP primary in 2012. That's not even the peculiar part. The peculiar part is that he is by no means alone in his party in thinking that way.