Santorum is Back, Still Hating Marriage Equality

It's been awhile since Rick Santorum has commented on same-sex marriage but the former candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination spewed anti-gay marriage rhetoric during the Midwest Republican Leadership Conference last month,Right Wing Watch reports.

In his speech, the former Pennsylvania senator, who has connected homosexuality to bestiality, said that if the GOP were to support marriage equality, it would be the end of the U.S. He also suggested that "Will & Grace" started the gay rights movement.

"When it came to the issues of changing the definition of marriage, there was no change -- none! Zero! For 30 years," Santorum said. "And then a television show came on the air called 'Will & Grace' -- and look at it from that point on!"

He went on to say that Christians will be persecuted and labeled as bigots if they speak against the LGBT community and gay marriage.

"We have hate crimes in this country," Santorum says. "For hate speech. It's coming."

Santorum then said it would be "suicidal" for the Republican Party to accept marriage equality.

"For the Republican party to even contemplate going along with this is the destruction of our republic," he said.

This isn't the first time Santorum has spewed this kind of rhetoric before. In April he once again said GOP supporting gay marriage would be "suicidal" and told the Des Moines Register that the Supreme Court would issue decisions in two cases against marriage equality.

"I think you'll see," he said, "hopefully, a chastened Supreme Court is not going to make the same mistake in the cases as they did in Roe v. Wade," the decision that legalized abortion in the United States. "I'm hopeful the Supreme Court learned its lesson about trying to predict where the American public is going on issues and trying to find rights in the Constitution that sit with the fancy of the day."

We all know how that turned out.

Watch a clip of Santorum's recent anti-gay speech below: