Barbara Walters Defends Rick Santorum’s ‘Feminism’ Comments, Joy Behar Calls Him A ‘Coward’

Rick Santorum has not exactly been saying the right things with the ladies recently.* He’s taken heat for a number of comments he made recently. Speaking about women in the military, he said that women shouldn’t be moved to the front because their male counterparts would just be overcome with “emotion” in trying to protect them, and, speaking about women impregnated during rape, he said that they should just “make the best of a bad situation.”** Santorum’s also got in trouble for a section of his book in which he argues that modern feminism has ruined the traditional family. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get a great response. What is surprising is that he got a defense from the unlikeliest of places; The View.

*Don’t worry, Rick. We’ve all been there, am I right, guys?

**Whoa? Really? He said that? Ok, I take it back. None of us have been there.

Now, this defense wasn’t exactly a full voiced endorsement and it certainly didn’t come from the talk show’s full panel with Joy Behar calling Santorum a “coward” and Whoopi Goldberg saying that he’d have a “big ol’ problem” if he brought these views into the White House. Barbara Walters, however, said that she could see what Santorum (Or his wife. He’s since claimed that it was actually she who wrote that part of the book) meant.

I very rarely take a political position because I work for ABC News, these are people I talk to, and so on. So there are things about Rick Santorum that I do not agree with. But I do feel that there was a time – and, you know, I’ve worked all my life. Not when I was four and five, but after that – that there was a time when feminists made the woman who stayed home and had children feel inferior. I think we are finally changing so that we realize younger ones, you can make a choice. So I don’t think that what he said is so terribly off the point. He probably will be surprised that I am on that side and I know [Joy] disagrees with me.”

Well, there you go. One of the five women on The View doesn’t actually like Rick Santorum but she totally kind of understands what he meant. I guess that’s a start!

Watch the clip from ABC below:

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.