Rick Santorum Compares
Obamacare To Apartheid, Himself To Nelson Mandela
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| Never one to shy away from insanity, Rick Santorum claimed that his fight against Obamacare is like the fight Mandela waged against apartheid. Cartoon by John Darkow, CagleCartoons.Com. |
On December 5, the
world lost one of the greatest human rights giants in history.
Nelson Mandela
spent his life fighting for civil rights and human dignity.
He died peacefully
at the ripe old age of 95.
But instead of paying tribute to Mandela, former and perhaps future GOP Presidential candidate Rick
Santorum went on Fox News that night and compared himself and the Republican
Party to the celebrated world leader.
Rick Santorum compared Obamacare to apartheid.
During an appearance
on the O’Reilly Factor, Santorum claimed that his fight against
Obamacare is like the fight Mandela waged against apartheid.
Apartheid was the brutal system of racial segregation that dominated life in
South Africa for decades until it came to an end in 1994. Obamacare, also known
as the Affordable Care Act, is the program that provides health insurance
options to millions of Americans.
But, Santorum insists
that the two are one and the same.
“Nelson Mandela stood
up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and
that’s the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he
performed,” Santorum said. “And I would make the argument that we have a great
injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of
government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives, and Obamacare is
front and center in that.”
Obamacare is nothing like apartheid.
Leave it to a
Republican to take the death of a great human being and spin it in the most
sickening way. We shouldn’t have to deal with statements like this at all, but
once again we are forced to do so. With that said, let us examine Santorum’s
stupidity.
Obamacare is the
response by the federal government to the fact that millions of Americans
cannot afford health care in this country. Many of them end up going to the
emergency room to get the care they need, thus passing off the expensive price
to everyone else and driving up health care costs. Insurance companies rejected
people with pre-existing conditions and often dropped people rather than pay
for their care.
But all of that ended
with Obamacare. Now, Americans must purchase health insurance just like they
must buy car insurance. To do that, Obamacare creates a marketplace where
private insurance companies actually compete for business, thus leading to
cheaper rates.
Santorum claims that
this is an injustice and that government is “controlling people’s lives,” but
that is hardly the case. Americans get to choose their own insurance policy
from the private company of their liking. The government is simply requiring
that people take responsibility for their health, which is why we have the
individual mandate.
As much as Republicans enjoy complaining about it, the
mandate was their idea in the first place. Besides, how is making sure that
everyone has health care an injustice? The real injustice would be preventing
people from getting care, therefore, Santorum is the one fighting for
injustice.
Apartheid and conservatives have much in
common.
Furthermore, it is
totally outrageous to compare health insurance to apartheid. Apartheid was
tyranny of the minority, which is something the GOP knows all too well
considering they've terrorized the Senate for years.
In South Africa, the white
minority put the system in place to guarantee that they would continue to rule.
Segregation divided people by race, and it’s a system that many right-wingers
in America long to return to. Black
people were required to carry an identification card and a passbook that any
white person could demand to see, so they could tell if they were allowed to be
where they were.
These passbook laws are akin to the “papers please” laws that
conservatives are pushing for in this country against the Latino community.
In addition, black
people weren’t allowed to vote, because the white minority feared losing power.
In the wake of the election of President Obama in 2008, the GOP has sought to
make voting more difficult for minority voters. As a result, many red states
have resorted to passing voter ID laws in an effort to suppress the vote.
This
is what a real comparison to apartheid looks like. Voter ID, papers please,
racism, a desire to re-instate segregation, tyranny of the minority, and the
fact that the GOP is comprised of mostly white men makes this not only a true
comparison, but a chilling one.
And one more thing.
During apartheid, social conservatism ran rampant, resulting in the restriction
of abortion, homosexuality, and sex education in South Africa. You know which
party is currently waging war against these three things in America? The Republican
Party. You know who else opposes these things? Rick Santorum. So you see,
unlike Obamacare, American conservatives have much in common with apartheid.
Having access to health care is not an
injustice and even Nelson Mandela believed that.
Access to health care
is not an injustice. Health care is a human right that everyone should have.
Even Nelson Mandela believed that. During a 1993 speech, Mandela said:
“The right to vote,
without food, shelter and health care, will create the appearance of equality
and justice, while actual inequality is entrenched.”
Mandela believed so
much in the right to health care that it was included in the new South African constitution that
he signed. In fact, Mandela went much further than President Obama did. He
created a public health care system funded by the government, which led to the
eventual creation of South Africa’s universal health care system. In no way
would Mandela call Obamacare an injustice. More than likely, he’d say it
doesn’t go far enough.
Republicans have compared Obamacare to
anything terrible they can think of.
But Rick Santorum and
many other conservatives don’t care. They are so obsessed with destroying the
signature legislative achievement of America’s first African-American
President, that they are willing to say and do anything to topple it.
To date,
Republicans have compared Obamacare to Hitler, Stalin, Nazism, communism,
slavery, the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the Holocaust, just to name a
few.
And now, Rick Santorum has added apartheid to the big list. Republicans
oppose Americans having health care so much that they are literally picking any
terrible thing throughout history to compare it to in an effort to scare people
from supporting it. That’s a true injustice that Nelson Mandela would be
disgusted by and so should most Americans.