Rick San­to­rum is the lat­est dar­ling of the most ex­treme of the GOP's ex­trem­ist vot­ers. Here's just an ear­ful of this guy's moral piety.

Let's start where it all starts for us hu­mans: con­cep­tion. Not only does San­to­rum in­sist that life be­gins at the in­stant that a sperm con­tacts an egg, he also wants to pre­serve the sanc­tity of sperm it­self by out­law­ing birth con­trol. Yes, every sperm counts. Last Oc­to­ber, he warned about "the dan­gers of con­tra­cep­tion in this coun­try…It's not OK. It's a li­cense to do things in a sex­ual realm that is counter to how things are sup­posed to be."

In­deed, Ay­a­tol­lah Rick is a bit ob­sessed with what you might be doing in your bed­room. The Supreme Court, he as­serts, was wrong to rule that we have a right to con­sen­sual sex in our homes. "Then you have the right to bigamy," he wails, "the right to polygamy…to in­cest…adul­tery…the right to any­thing." Then comes his punch line: "This right to pri­vacy doesn't exist in my opin­ion in the United States Con­sti­tu­tion."

In a Jan­u­ary in­ter­view on CNN, the sanc­ti­mo­nious San­to­rum of­fered an­other star­tling in­sight into his moral code. When asked what he'd say to his daugh­ter if she had been raped, was preg­nant, and was cry­ing for an abor­tion, he ac­tu­ally said, "the right ap­proach is to ac­cept this hor­ri­bly cre­ated, in the sense of rape…gift of life and ac­cept what God is giv­ing you." He added that his daugh­ter — and pre­sum­ably yours, too — ought to "make the best out of a bad sit­u­a­tion."

So much Rick, so lit­tle time. I haven't even got­ten to global warm­ing ("no such thing," he says), or his en­dorse­ment of the Cru­sades as being about "core Amer­i­can val­ues," or his com­par­i­son of ho­mo­sex­u­al­ity to "man-on-dog" sex. But, with the na­tional spot­light now on San­to­rum, we can count on many more Rickisms to en­lighten us.