Foster Friess, the billionaire money-man backing Rick Santorum, who shocked and delighted the political world yesterday when he suggested holding an aspirin between your knees as a cheap form of birth control, wants to assure everyone that he was just making a terrible joke. “To all those who took my joke as modern day approach I deeply apologize and seek your forgiveness,” he wrote on his blog, which exists, and will have a lot more readers from here on out. Santorum, too, told reporters that he thought Friess had simply made a “bad joke” in “bad taste,” and added, ”Obviously I don’t agree with the basic premise.”
But doesn’t he? “Hold an aspirin between your knees” is just a more colorful way of saying, “just keep your legs closed,” which is tantamount to “just don’t have sex.” It’s abstinence, pure and simple. Which is exactly what Santorum advocates. He’s said that unless you’re trying to procreate, you shouldn’t be having sex, and therefore, contraception is “not okay.” He has promised to make this argument to the American people as president. As far we can tell, the only difference between Friess’s bad contraception joke and Santorum’s actual contraception beliefs is an aspirin.
