Rick Santorum Quotes

This right to privacy ... doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold–Griswold was the contraceptive case–and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more ...this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, 'Well, it's my individual freedom.' Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

At my core, what I think we need to do is to get the basics right again. We need to rebuild our family structure, stay away from redefining marriage, and stand by marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Husbands & wifes [sic] are separating at a fearful rate and “taking up” with other persons. Not infrequently a man is living with two or three wifes. Though this has been the custom of the race and habit of the country for years, yet it cannot be looked upon in any light than a huge system of prostitution by sane persons.

Polygamy is needed to prevent a man from taking up a lover, which can cause health issues and rifts in the family and would lead him to live a lie, constantly deceiving his wife and children.

If the social conservatives feel that they have a strong argument on traditional marriage, then feel free to have it.

We're going to keep trying to strengthen the American family, to make them more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.

You must be aware that most men (and also not only a few women) are by nature not monogamous. This nature makes itself even more forceful when tradition and circumstance stand in an individual's way.

At a time when the American family is threatened as never before, redefining it away from the union of one man and one woman only promises to weaken it as a child-rearing, values-conveying institution.

No, not at liberty; because it was considered a stain on the family, but the young men did it; there was a good deal of it.  They often kept one girl steady and sometimes two on different places; men who had wives did it too sometimes; if they could get it on their own place it was easier but they would go wherever they could get it.

Thro’ want of Ministers to marry and thro’ the licentiousness of the People, many hundreds live in Concubinage – swopping their Wives as Cattel, and living in a State of Nature, more irregularly and unchastely than the Indians.

One of the basic forms of marriage, the practice of which, historically, had far exceeded that of any other form.

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.

Our crime has been: We married women instead of seducing them; we reared children instead of destroying them; we desired to exclude from the land prostitution, bastardy and infanticide.

By your actions in Campaign 2016, you have harmed all of our witness. You have made it more difficult to save the lost and more difficult to protect the rights of faithful believers. You have dragged down the reputation of penitent heroes of the Bible to justify the sins of Donald Trump. You have dismissed claims of sexual assault against Donald Trump. You have subverted and perverted the Word to justify and excuse the behavior of a man who finds it acceptable to degrade others and revel in sexual sin.

I don't support gay marriage; indeed, I find it to be unnatural in the deepest sense of that word…. Marriage must, indeed, be re-founded on a much more radical level than that imagined by the egalitarian ‘Religious Right’ and ‘Constitutionalists’; marriage must not merely be ‘between a man and woman’; the family must become an integral part of the health of our race — of our charge to birth a strong, intelligent, beautiful, and productive people.

I'm interested in continuing our conversation about the discomfiture I picked up in the mainstream media with one particular element of this debate. It was this discomfort with a law against adultery.

Those who imagine polygamy to be handy cover for promiscuity are apparently off the mark. If polygamists share one quality, it is that, polygamy aside, they are extraordinarily strait-laced.

I believe in the traditional American family, and I will do everything that I can to promote, you know, families.

I believe marriages should be legally defined as between one man and one woman.

I have voted in support of efforts in the Senate to enact a Constitutional amendment that would have limited marriage to one man and one woman only.

We need more children raised in the optimum situation, which is between a mom and a dad bonded together for life.

The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.

Where I stand comes from my upbringing and my faith: I'm 100 percent pro-life and I believe in traditional marriage.

We need a Congress that understands the sanctity of life, the sanctity of traditional values, the sanctity of traditional marriage.

I support anyone who supports what's in the Republican platform, which includes support for traditional marriage.