Speaking on New Hampshire radio station WGIR on Sunday , the former Pennsylvania senator said he hadn't caught the skit, but did say he's been blasted mercilessly for standing up for family values.
"We’ve been hammered by the left for my standing up for the traditional family and I will continue to do so," Santorum said. "The left, unfortunately, participates in bullying more than the right does. They say that they’re tolerant, and they’re anything but tolerant of people who disagree with them and support traditional values....I welcome the criticism, go ahead. I'm going to stand up for the values that made this country great."
Part of those values that Santorum speaks about is his opposition to same sex marriage and the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of gays in the military.
But it was his comparing gay sex to bestiality that put him on the radar for activists in the gay community back in 2003. Among those who fired back was sex columnist Dan Savage, who made sure that the top Google result for a search of "santorum" is a page defining the word as a graphic term relating to anal sex, something Santorum says Google could fix if it wanted to.
Santorum told Politico last month that “I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it. If you're a responsible business, you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”
A Google spokesman responded to the Christian Science Monitor to Santorum's complaints:
"Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Web,” says spokesman Gabriel Stricker via email. Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly, he suggests, adding that once the webmaster takes the page down from the Web, “it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process."
“We do not remove content from our search results,” he says, “except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”
Meanwhile Santorum is expected to appear in the same room as the other GOP presidential candidates for tonight's debate in Las Vegas, hosted by CNN's Anderson Cooper.
