Santorum Slogan Echoes ... Langston Hughes Poem?

Poet's pro-gay, pro-union themes don't seem to mesh
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 15, 2011 7:12 PM CDT
Rick Santorum, Langston Hughes: Candidate Unaware Slogan Echoes Poem
Rick Santorum: "Not a big poetry guy."   (AP Photo/Spartanburg Herald-Journal, Alex Hicks Jr.)

Rick Santorum is taking a ribbing today after Think Progress asked him whether he knew that his campaign slogan of "Fighting to Make America America Again" seems to be borrowed from a "pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes." (The poem is called Let America Be America and can be read in full here.) Santorum said it was news to him. "The folks who worked on that slogan for me didn’t inform me that that’s where it came from, if in fact it came from that."

For the record, the gay news site the Advocate says there's disagreement on whether Hughes, was, in fact, gay, though he definitely wrote in support of gay rights. Santorum, on the other hand, "has spent a fair amount of his political career fighting gay rights advancements, having once compared same-sex couples with people who have sex with dogs." Either way, then, it's not a great match. Or as Daily Intel puts it, the slogan is "like the least Santorum-y thing in the world." Click to read more. (More Rick Santorum stories.)

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