Senator Rick Santorum Speech Q&A

What follows is a transcript of the Question-and-Answer session with Rick Santorum, former Senator, now with the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, following his speech to The Media Project's course on Religion & Politics.
(1) QUESTION: Name for us the five or six words you heard
attached to religion and politics in your years in the Senate…For
example, the New York Times editor, Bill Keller, admits that his paper
uses the word “moderate” to describe people they like and it tends to
use the word “fundamentalist” in a way that isn’t historically
accurate.
  
ANSWER:
 

Any time you would ever see my name in any mainstream, Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times,
it was always “staunch,” it was always very, very absolute, very nasty,
hard kinds of language. “Extremist” was used. “Theocrat” was used. It
was always – and here’s the point – every time my name was mentioned in
a story, there would always be an adjective. That in itself is very
important because if Ted Kennedy was listed, it was always just “Ted
Kennedy.” It was never “the liberal”. It was always “the conservative”,
“the religious conservative”, “the fundamentalist” or it was always an
adjective to try to drive the point home over and over again. “Zealous”
was used many times, and a lot worse.
 
But I’m saying that in news articles, there was always an attempt to
form public opinion just by my name. Just by associating words with my
name. It’s never done on the Left. And you will have a Democrat who is
as hard left as you could be, and they use the term “moderate.” Or if
the person is like Paul Wellstone,
who unfortunately died in a plane crash a few years back, who was a
college professor and was just way out there. He was just proud of the
fact that he was just an extreme liberal. They (the media) would use
term “Paul Wellstone”, or occasionally they would say “liberal”. But
they would never, ever ever use something pejorative to frame who this
guy was. Whereas, if you have anybody who is on the conservative side
of the spectrum, they get nailed every time.
 
And it’s just insidious. And it’s most of the time focused on the
sexual issues. If you’re a hard-core free-market guy, they’re not going
to call you “zealous”. They’re not going to call you
“ultra-conservative”. They’re not going to do that to you.
 
It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to
freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to with any of
the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do
all of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy. And you’re
dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s
the most central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at.