Likely Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday quoted Westboro Church's infamous "God Hates Fags" slogan in defense of an Indiana law that allowed Christian businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples.
After Indiana revised its law to allow so that it did not override anti-discrimination ordinances in local municipalities, Santorum told CBS host Norah O'Donnell that he had hoped for more religious protections.
"I think the language they had is better language, this is acceptable language," he explained in an interview that aired on Sunday. "It doesn't do a lot of the things -- it doesn't really open the debate up on some of the more current issues."
"I think the current language that the federal law is -- and now Indiana is -- has been held to have a pretty limited view of religious liberty -- religious freedom is in the workplace," the former Pennsylvania senator insisted. "And I think we need to look at, as religious liberty is now being pushed harder, to provide more religious protections, and that bill doesn't do that."
Santorum argued that wedding planners should not be forced to serve same-sex couples because "tolerance is a two-way street."
"If you're a print shop and you are a gay man, should you be forced to print 'God Hates Fags' for the Westboro Baptist Church because they hold those signs up?" he asked. "Should the government -- and this is really the case here -- should the government force you to do that?"
"And that's what these cases are all about. This is about the government coming in and saying, 'No, we're going to make you do this.' And this is where I just think we need some space to say let's have some tolerance, be a two-way street."
However, Sarah Warbelow of the Human Rights Campaign told O'Donnell that Santorum seemed to misunderstand the law.
"The legislation would have done no such thing," she said. "It explicitly allowed individuals to use their religious beliefs to undermine other types of laws that provide protection, not only against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, but against other religious minorities and in some instances, against African-Americans and Asian-Americans."
