February 23, 2012 | 4:12 am

Dowd: Santorum a ‘small-town mullah’ who wants to ban contraceptives

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Rick Santorum at the Maricopa County Lincoln Day Luncheon in Phoenix, Az. Feb. 21. Photo by REUTERS/Joshua Lott

Many Christians are scared of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, but Maureen Dowd argues that we should all be really, really afraid of “Rick’s Religious Fanaticism.” Rick, of course, would be Rick Santorum. Calling him a “small-town mullah,” Dowd writes:

Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as he called it four years ago. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America,” he told students at Ave Maria University in Florida. He added that mainline Protestantism in this country “is in shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”

Satan strikes, a Catholic exorcist told me, when there are “soul wounds.” Santorum, who is considered “too Catholic” even by my über-Catholic brothers, clearly believes that America’s soul wounds include men and women having sex for reasons other than procreation, people involved in same-sex relationships, women using contraception or having prenatal testing, environmentalists who elevate “the Earth above man,” women working outside the home, “anachronistic” public schools, Mormonism (which he said is considered “a dangerous cult” by some Christians), and President Obama (whom he obliquely and oddly compared to Hitler and accused of having “some phony theology”).

That’s a lot of causes to be fighting against—we already know what he thinks about how gay marriage affects children.

But Dowd’s main concern seems to be the threat that Santorum poses to a woman’s right to choose ... to use contraceptives. She refers specifically to his declaration that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case that invalidated a ban on contraceptives, was incorrectly decided.

Certainly, though, there is more to be said about Santorum and how his religious beliefs have shaped his politics.