Anti-Satanism may not be a winning strategy for conservatives but neither will a hash pipe in every pot.
Santorum's not behind the times, he's ahead of them. At some point America will be compelled to address the moral delinquencies that made this time possible; it will also be compelled to address who orchestrated the moral disintegration so many feel around them. It is only natural that Santorum would be accused of promoting theocracy by people who themselves have spend decades trying to create a materialist utopia on earth that is nothing less than a secular theocracy.
Re-read Amendment 1 and assorted writings on the division between church and state, re-examine Santorum's various public statements over the last month wherein he spouts his religious-based totalitarian policy intents, and think about why the Founders DID NOT INTEND THIS TO BE A "Christian nation". Or a Jewish one, or a Muslim one, or a Buddhist one... This *IS* a secular nation, where those who choose to worship may do so as they choose, and those who do not are free in that respect as well, and the government gets to keep its nose out of the whole thing. Religion is NOT the be-all, end-all answer to "moral failures" real or imagined - given the very public failings of assorted prominent and widespread religious types over the years, one might in fact argue convincingly that religion might be the OPPOSITE of the answer, at least on an organized level. You worry about yours, I'll worry about mine. I'm doin' all right on that score, and any failings I might have are between me and God.
You, and Mr. Santorum, can feel free to live your lives in accordance with the will of the Roman Catholic Church as you choose - I have precisely zero issue with that. What I *DO* have an issue with is an attempt by agents of the government, or would-be agents, to force the will of the Roman Catholic Church upon NON-Roman-Catholics including myself, my wife, my friends... And Santorum's blatant freaking hypocrisy doesn't help him, either. Stay out of my face about it on a personal level, and don't make government policy based on it on an official level.
I'm less worried about Joe Q. Public taking a toke and having sex with his girlfriend without having to worry about her getting pregnant than I am about our government spending twice as much money as it actually has to spend in a year, EVERY year, because no one in charge is willing to even CONSIDER turning off the tap. I'm more worried about a "compassionate-conservative"
government which can pass odious and unConstitutional bills like the grossly-offensively-named "USA PATRIOT" Act without it even being *READ* before the vote; about a government which insists that the only way we can allow citizens to travel about the country is for them to show their papers (what is this, a WW2 movie?!?
) and submit to being irradiated and seen naked or having breast, buttocks, and genitals groped - or, all too often, BOTH; about a government which is so frightened about what might happen if we permitted people to decide for themselves what they can put into their own bodies (and hold them responsible for any negative consequences to self or others) that it's preferable to that government to institute policies whereby agents of the government can seize - and KEEP - your home and land and car and bank assets if someone else plants a couple of marijuana plants on the corner of your property, and can send masked stormtroopers to break down your door and stomp your pets and throw your wife and kids up against the wall and point machineguns at them if they think that you have an ounce of pot in your cookie jar; about a government in place because we (society) keep vacillating between one branch of the Modern American Political Machine to the other and back again, and the situation KEEPS GETTING WORSE. A government which can deliberately lose track of thousands of firearms sold over the protest of the dealers to known or suspected criminals who will take them across our southern border, and then try to use those firearms as a reason to violate the RKBA of tens of millions of us who are not any part of any problem. A government which uses unwarranted searches and GPS tracking and wiretaps and datamining to monitor schoolkids and those who speak out about this country's problems. A government which seeks to curtail and VIOLATE individual liberties, rather than protect them.
Santorum is not going to fix ANY of that. He wants to *EXPAND* it. (To be fair, so do Romney and Obama.) I'm not going to be voting for ANY of those rat-bastard statists, but I'm almost certainly going to be stuck with one of them, instead of having someone who will actually at least TRY to make things better for us all. So-called "social conservatives" for the LOSS, is more like it.