2012 Presidential Election

At the same time that the nation's leading networks can't call Obama a “liberal” more than about once a year, NPR's religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty on Monday announced Rick Santorum was “very, very conservative” on the social issues, in addition to being “very pro-life.” He even — horrors! — home-schools his seven children. “He's Catholic. He's billed himself very much as the family values candidate,” the reporter announced on NPR's afternoon show Talk of The Nation. “His wife Karen has homeschooled all seven of their children. He's surging in the polls because he's been very, very conservative on these issues.” They also discussed if white conservative Christians dislike Obama because they're racists. Hagerty added that evangelicals aren't too worried about the Catholic thing with Santorum: By the way, I should say that if Catholics and Protestants –evangelicals no longer have a problem with Catholics. That went away back in the 1990s or so, and something like 82 percent of evangelicals have favorable views of Catholics. So that's not a stumbling block for him. And he is very — he — you check the mark on the boxes on all of their big issues. He's very pro-life. He supports a federal marriage amendment. He says he'd work to limit birth control, to ban stem cell research, to reinstate the military's “don't ask, don't tell” policy. He wants to pass a workplace religious freedom act, allow prayer at school events, including graduation, football games, that kind of thing. So he is really playing to evangelicals here. Hagerty then moved to Gingrich and described his wife Callista as a “very devout Catholic,” and then walked that label back by noting the “irony” of the “very devout” woman having an extramarital affair with a very prominent married man in Washington: NEAL CONAN, host: Newt Gingrich is fourth in most of the polls. Previous, a month ago, we would have put him somewhere different, but at this moment fourth, and in some ways the most interesting. He has converted to Catholicism. HAGERTY: That's right. His is a very interesting spiritual journey. He was born Lutheran. He converted to Southern Baptist in graduate school. And then in 2009, he converted to Catholicism. Now, the person who was central to that was his third wife, Callista. She's a very devout Catholic. She sings, actually, in the professional choir at the Basilica of the National Shrine here in Washington, D.C. And what would happen — they got married in 2000, and he began going to Mass with her every week to watch her perform. And he says it just kind of seeped in, this Catholicism, seeped into his psyche, so to speak. Now one — many people would see a little bit of irony to the fact that Callista was the one that really led him to Catholicism, because he was having an affair with Callista for six years before he divorced his second wife. And so there is a little bit of irony in that, and I