Adultery,
Incest, Whatever
Washington
Post, April 24, 2003
1150 15th Street NW, Washington, DC 20071
Email: letterstoed@washpost.com
Put the legal framework aside for a moment and consider,
simply, Sen. Rick Santorum’s list: “If the Supreme Court says that you
have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home,” he told an
Associated Press reporter this week, “then 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.” By its grammatical
construction this is a list of approximate equals, in this case equal in
deviance. It may be broad-minded of Mr. Santorum (R-Pa.) to include adultery,
as that must encompass some in his professional acquaintance. But that’s
small comfort to those who oppose prejudice against homosexuals, now
offensively lumped in by the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference with
bigamists and those who practice incest, not to mention the vast Caligulan
landscape that “anything” might encompass.
That said, the legal framework matters. This is not one
of those offhand gaffes, like Sen. Trent Lott’s comparison of homosexuals
with alcoholics and kleptomaniacs. As is clear from the longer transcript of
the interview, Mr. Santorum is espousing a worldview, and a disturbing one. On
one side are defenders of the “healthy, stable, traditional family.” On
the other are practitioners of what he calls the “right-to-privacy
lifestyle,” by which he means an attitude that “as long as it’s private,
as long as it’s consensual,” it’s okay, even if deviant. Mr. Santorum
favors the former attitude, which is his right. But then he takes it a step
further. This right-to-privacy lifestyle “destroys the basic unit of our
society,” he argues, and thus communities should be able to outlaw it if
they wish. So “if New York doesn’t want sodomy laws . . . fine.” But if
Texas or Pennsylvania do want sodomy laws, or adultery laws, that’s even
finer.
So here we have a prominent Republican legislator
advocating the right of states to sic their police on two consenting adults in
their own home. You don’t have to be pro-”anything” to know what’s
wrong with this. Bigamy and polygamy are not questions of privacy; they are
regulated by the state as violations of a legal marriage contract. Whether
states should sanction homosexual marriage is also a question of civil law,
and a controversial one. But Mr. Santorum isn’t taking on that question;
he’s advocating the criminalization of private behavior between two men or
two women that (unlike, often, adultery) has no victims. The fact that many
people disapprove of it does not justify sending the police to knock down
doors and barge into bedrooms.
In his interview, Mr. Santorum said that he has “no
problem with homosexuality,” just “homosexual acts.” This is a
distinction made by others in his party and some of their favorite
conservative theologians. They can choose to parse it however they wish. But
people who choose differently should be left in peace.
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