CNN cuts ties with controversial former Republican senator Santorum

CNN cut ties with the former Republican senator and current television analyst Rick Santorum in the wake of his disparaging comments about American Indian culture.

On CNN, Santorum was a high-level political commentator often charged with giving the Republican point of view during election campaign coverage.

Alison Rudnick, Vice President of Communications for CNN’s HLN television channel and CNN’s Diversity and Inclusion area, confirmed on Saturday Santorum’s separation from the television network.

The former legislator sparked the controversy in an April 23 speech to Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization. Santorum said that immigrants created from scratch a nation based on the Judeo-Christian ethic.

“We gave birth to a nation from nothing,” he pointed out. “Yes, there were Native Americans, but there is not much Native American culture in American culture.”

For this comment, Fawn Sharp, president of the National Indian Congress of the United States, described Santorum as “an unhinged and embarrassing racist who dishonors CNN and any other media company that provides him with a platform.”

“To put things in their place, what the European colonizers found on the American continent were thousands of complex, intelligent and sovereign tribal nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development,” Sharp wrote in a statement.

Sharp asked CNN to fire Santorum or he could face a boycott of more than 500 tribal nations and their allies around the world. Santorum later said on Chris Cuomo’s show on CNN that he “misstated” in the sense of that it was not clear that he was speaking in the context of the founding of the United States government.

“People say I’m trying to dismiss what happened to Native Americans,” he said. “Conversely, the way we treated Native Americans was horrible. It goes against the depths of one and everything for which I have fought as a leader in Congress.”

Santorum has drawn criticism before for his views, especially on same-sex marriage and homosexuality. In 2003 he angered gay rights activists when he appeared to liken homosexuality to pedophilia and brutality.