10 Controversial Santorum Quotes That Aren’t Going Away, From Satan to Gay Marriage [VIDEO]

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum may be surging in the polls ahead of Mitt Romney just a week before the Arizona and Michigan primaries, but that has come along with intense media scrutiny and the discovery of rather controversial comments.

Over the past few days the former Pennsylvania senator has found himself defending comments he's made in the past about gay marriage, Satan and birth control.

I will defend everything I say, Santorum told reporters on Tuesday.

He better get used to it. Below are a list of ten quotes that have recently made its way through the news cycle and show no signs of going away.

1. In a 2008 speech at the Catholic Ave Maria University in Florida, Santorum said that America was threatened by Satan.

Satan has his sights on the United States of America! he said.

Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition...This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country--the United States of America.

2. In the same 2008 speech, Santorum implied that mainline Protestants are no longer true Christians.

This was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism--and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is a shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it, Santorum said. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they're pious to use both vanity and pride to also go after the church?

3. At a campaign stop on Feb. 18, 2012, Santorum said President Barack Obama based his views on some phony ideology. He later said he meant to insult the president's liberal ideology, not imply he wasn't Christian.

[Obama's Agenda is based on] some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.

4. Santorum dissed the public school system while at the same campaign stop in Ohio on Feb. 18 and said he would home-school his kids in the White House.

Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it's their responsibility to educate their children, he said, according to The New York Times.

Yes the government can help. But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.

5. In an interview with CNN's John King on Feb. 9, 2012, Santorum said he had concerns about women in combat.

I think that could be a very compromising situation where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved.

He later told CNN's Wolf Blitzer he was talking about both men and women's emotional issues.

If you're out there, for example, in a group, or just two people, and some people, because of women, have, as you know with respect to physical capabilities, they don't have the same requirements that men do in the military, and may be in a position if someone is injured, has to be brought back ... The other example is the emotions of men, dealing with women in combat, and having men not focusing potentially on the mission but on the natural instinct to protect someone that's a female.

6. In a 2006 interview with a Comcast program, Santorum said that birth control is harmful to women.

I guess it is and have voted for contraception, although I don't think it works. I think it's harmful to women. I think it's harmful to our society to have a society that says that sex outside of marriage is something that should be encouraged or tolerated ..., particularly among the young and it has I think we've seen very, very harmful long-term consequences to the society. Birth control to me enables that and I don't think it's a healthy thing for our country.

7. At a campaign stop in Iowa on Jan. 2, 2012, Santorum dissed welfare programs that make black people's lives better.

I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money, he said, according to ABC News.

8. In a 2008 interview with radio host Mike Signorile, Santorum compared gay marriage to incest in polygamy.

If I'm a brother and a sister and I want to get married, or if I'm three man and two women and I want to get married, if it's all about equality, and people should be treated the same, why not allow that to happen? Why not allow any combination of people or situation -- if it's all about equality then let's just allow any number, any way, get married if that's what it's about. And you say, 'well that's different.' No, it's not different.

Buzzfeed published the audio:

9. Santorum faced heavy criticism by the Netherlands media earlier in February by claiming that the country advocates mass murder through involuntary euthanasia.

Santorum claimed that euthanasia makes up 10 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands.

Half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, because they are old or sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don't go to a hospital, they go to another country because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, that they will not come out of that hospital.

10. This example includes a Santorum spokesperson, rather than Santorum himself: Press Secretary Alice Stewart claims she misspoke when she described Obama's policies as radical Islamic ones and meant to say environmentalist.

While MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell asked Stewart about Santorum's phony comment, she said, [Santorum] was referring to the president's policies in terms of the radical islamic policies that the president has specifically in terms of energy explorations.

10.