Where the candidates stand on Satan

I'm looking forward to John King quizzing all the candidates tonight on their positions on Satan. I tweeted something about that last night and a friend tweeted back with a question CNN might want to use:

Could the states make Satan illegal if they wanted to?

Because Satan might be right for some states but not for others.

I wish I could watch the debate live but I'll be at Mass, receiving those ashes we'll all be forced to sport daily under the coming repressive sweater-vested Santorum theocracy, in which women will be "prevented from having birth control" and forced to "stay home and homeschool their children!" (That's about 1:50 into the video. Note that neither Ari Fleischer nor Erick Erickson called Hillary Whoever on those falsehoods, at least not within the clip provided. I would have asked her how exactly a President Santorum would effect his barefoot-and-pregnant agenda.)

Anyway, when asked about Satan tonight, Newt might want to use that old "I was for him before I was against him" line.

As for Romney, I don't think the liberal media is quite ready to play the Mormon card, so he won't be asked about his church's take on Satan. And despite the very active role Romney has played in his church over the decades, there seems to exist no incriminating footage of him speaking as a Mormon to other Mormons, at least not any that Romney-booster Matt Drudge has seen fit to feature on his site. Go figure.

I suppose Romney's stand on Lucifer would depend on which way the wind was blowing, but he can always go with declaring himself personally opposed to the Father of Lies.

Obama has shown a certain sympathy for the devil but normally he defines evil as that which gets in his way.

Like a rock, Rick Santorum is standing by his strong opposition to the Devil:

"I’m a person of faith. I believe in good and evil,” Santorum said in response to questions from CNN.

“If somehow or another because you’re a person of faith and you believe in good and evil is a disqualifier for president, we’re going to have a very small pool of candidates who can run for president,” Santorum said.

Excerpts of Santorum’s speech were splashed across the conservative leaning Drudge Report for much of Tuesday.

Santorum dismissed the Drudge article as “absurd.”

"If they want to go ahead and dig up old speeches to a religious group they can go right ahead and do so. I'm going to stay on message. I'm going to talk about the things Americans want to talk about," Santorum said to CNN.

When pressed further if he believed Satan was attacking America, as he said in his 2008 speech, Santorum insisted the subject is not on the minds of voters.

“Guys these are questions that are not relevant to what’s being discussed in America today,” Santorum said.

“What we’re talking about in America today is trying to get America growing. That’s what my speeches are about. That’s we’re going to talk about in this campaign,” he added.

Please note: Rick Santorum didn't bring this up. Someone else found the Ave Maria speech from 2008 and passed it on to Drudge. It wasn't the candidate's stump speech but rather a talk given to fellow believers during a period when he was out of politics. So try not to panic.

Judging by his response above, Santorum is following the narrow path described here by William McGurn:

The answer is that when Mr. Santorum discusses these issues, he needs to fold them into his larger narrative about the free society. That narrative has to do with pointing out the dependency that comes with an expanding federal government, the importance of family, and the threat to freedom when, say, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals or a Health and Human Services secretary can substitute their own opinions on these issues for the judgment of the American people.

And he must neither compromise his values nor get lost in "the weeds of theological debate."

Stay tuned.

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Byron York: America believes in the devil. And hey, why isn't anyone grilling Romney on his religious beliefs? 

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Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link. See her column on the the framing of Rick Santorum. A bit:

And as my column pointed out today, Santorum has been hitting the Democrats’ anti-science green cult hard on everything from Keystone to fracking and oil exploration. Along with Obamacare, this is a key policy issue where Santorum’s record rises above the Romney/Gingrich troublesome flirtations with eco-nitwittery.

This, not the hyperventilating of Beltway bigots, is resonating with voters in the heartland. . . .

Read the whole thing.

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