Santorum Staffer Under Fire for 'Sexist' Email: 'Is It God's Highest Desire...to Have a Woman Rule'?

A staffer to Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is fending off controversy over an email he sent last summer questioning whether a woman should be president.

Jamie Johnson, Santorum's Iowa coalitions director, sent an email in June saying children's lives would be harmed if the country elected a female president, the Des Moines Register reported Friday.

“The question then comes, ‘Is it God’s highest desire, that is, his biblically expressed will, … to have a woman rule the institutions of the family, the church, and the state?’" Johnson reportedly wrote.

According to NBC News, he sent the message from his private email account. It surfaced in the fall after its recipient passed it on to a member of then-GOP candidate Michele Bachmann's campaign.

Peter Waldron, who worked as Bachmann's national faith outreach director, blasted the Santorum campaign Saturday in an email to Buzzfeed, accusing the former Pennsylvania senator of deploying a "sexist strategy" against his candidate in Iowa. He demanded an apology from Santorum and said "misogyny was a serious issue in Iowa" and that “medieval attitudes” are to blame for Bachmann's poor showing in the state's caucuses, NBC reported.

Bachmann suspended her presidential bid after netting a mere 5 percent in Iowa, coming in ahead only of Jon Huntsman, who did not compete in the state.

But Johnson, a pastor at a central Iowa church, said the email was meant to be a private message to a friend and not intended to be read by anyone else, according to the Register.

He told NBC it has been "blown way out of proportion," and was not an official campaign correspondence.

"I was sharing my personal reflections with a friend through my private email account -– not the campaign account," Johnson told NBC. “They were reflections on over 25 years of formal, theological study” based in “classical Christian doctrine.”

According to the Register, the charge that sexism is the reason behind Bachmann's poor performance in Iowa is not new: As her poll numbers plummeted following her historic Ames straw poll win, Bachmann's "national aides and evangelical organization team privately complained that sexism coursed through Iowa’s religious conservative community," the newspaper reported.

Santorum on Saturday won the backing of 150 social conservative and evangelical Christian leaders.