OK, it was a bad joke about how women should just keep their legs closed if they don’t want to get pregnant. And it’s easy for the Santorum campaign to shrug it off as a joke, just as it’s easy for us to laugh about it.
But the problem here is that it’s actually not a joke at all. Rick Santorum believes that birth control is a dangerous sin, and that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control.
That is to say, the joke about “squeezing an aspiring between your knees” as birth control is not “off-color” or “crossing the line”: It’s accurately depicting the Santorum campaign’s position on birth control and consensual male-female sex.
Santorum may say now that he thinks birth control should be available (one wonders why his argument doesn’t apply to abortion, but we’ll skip that), but his stance on birth control affordability/availability is clear: he believes birth control pills are bad, and that people should not use them and that abstinence is the only method.
“Aspirin between the knees” is the reality of the Santorum campaign, not just a one-off line by a surrogate.
The Unpersons 