The
Right to Be Let Be
Baltimore
Sun, April 23, 2003
501 N. Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21278
Fax: 410-332-6977
Email: letters@baltsun.com
Gay rights advocates want the Senate Republican
leadership to punish Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania for expressing views they
say are insensitive to homosexuals. But Senator Santorum actually offered a
good argument for why the Supreme Court should rule in their favor in a case
testing the constitutionality of state prohibitions on sodomy.
The alarm bells went off when Mr. Santorum said in an
interview that he feared a court ruling upholding the right of consenting
adults to engage in private homosexual activity would lead down a perilous
trail to additional expanded liberties. Under such a privacy protection, he
warned, “you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you
have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right
to anything.”
His legal logic is hard to follow since the other
activities involve marriage contracts and public health concerns. But his
effort to try to hold back the tide washing over his idealized vision of the
world demonstrates what gay and lesbian partners face in their quest to simply
live their lives—and why they need the court’s protection.
Consensual gay sex, along with bigamy, incest, adultery,
etc., is “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family,” the
senator argued. “Traditional” is the key word here. The Ozzie and Harriet
world he yearns for doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. Repeated divorce
and remarriage, along with the public acknowledgement of gay relationships
once kept in the shadows, have radically changed the composition of many
families. They have single parents, two parents of the same gender, children
of different parents, ex-spouses and long-time companions. All these groupings
can be healthy and stable if those involved are committed to them.
The threshold question before the Supreme Court is much
easier to decide than the shape of the American family. The case was sparked
by police looking for a crazed gunman. They entered the apartment of a Houston
man, found him having sex with another man, and charged them both with sodomy
under a Texas law that doesn’t apply to heterosexual partners.
A majority of the court seemed inclined during last
month’s hearing to agree the Texas law violated constitutional guarantees to
equal treatment. It’s one of the last of its kind in the nation.
But there is a broader issue the court should also
tackle. It should define some zone of private intimate behavior where
moralizing politicians with no higher purpose than imposing their own beliefs
on the choices of others can no longer tread.
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