You might remember a while back when Rick Santorum made some astonishingly ignorant statements about Native Americans. There was outrage. There were calls for him to be let go from his main gig at CNN. And then…nothing happened. It seemed the network would continue to employ one of their few token right-wingers, that people would forget what he said and move on. But someone at CNN didn’t forget and now, nearly a month after his comments went viral, Santorum was given the can.
As per The Huffington Post, CNN terminated their contract with the politician-turned-commentator, who was a senator for Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007, during which he was one of the most outspoken conservative figures in Congress, regularly railing about, among other subjects, homosexuality. Santorum’s infamy among the left was such that sex columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage named a neologism after his surname, which he defined as a graphic gay sex act.
But it took him making ignorant comments about Native Americans to finally cost him his day job. Santorum made his offending statements at a seminar for religious freedom in late April. He was talking about the pilgrims who came from Europe and took over land that was already occupied. But he didn’t think kicking people off their land as a bad thing.
“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here,” he told the crowd. “I mean, yes, we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
Santorum faced massive backlash over the statements, but don’t feel too sorry for him. There’s plenty of far right organizations that will hire someone who doesn’t think highly of Native Americans, and he doesn’t even have to settle for Fox News.
(Via HuffPo)