Santorum’s
Big Mouth
United
Press International (Unification Church), April 25, 2003
By Michael Kirkland, UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent
From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk
WASHINGTON—Want to know what’s
the buzz among the Washington media corps?
The favorite topic among reporters in the nation’s
capital isn’t the ongoing situation in Iraq.
It isn’t the threat of nuclear weapons from North
Korea.
It isn’t the president’s chance of being re-elected
in 2004.
It isn’t the frightening advance of severe acute
respiratory syndrome—SARS.
It’s not even the war against terrorism, or the odds of
getting charred if Osama bin Laden sets off a radioactive “dirty bomb”
near the office.
What has the Washington media talking is a comment by
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., on homosexual sex.
The inside story is that the senator’s words were even
more picturesque than originally reported. Santorum’s comments were so
beyond the pale, the shaken interviewer had to call for a break to get back on
track.
Last month, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the
Texas statute that bans homosexual sodomy.
The challengers, a gay Houston couple rousted from the
privacy of their bedroom by police answering a phony weapons call, argue that
the Texas law is unconstitutional in two ways:
It bans sodomy for homosexuals, but not for
heterosexuals, in violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal
treatment under the law.
And it violates an intrinsic “privacy and liberty
interest” implicit in the Constitution and that guarantees consenting adults
the right to do what they want in the bedroom.
Santorum said the danger is in the second
proposition—if the Supreme Court rules that there is indeed such a
“privacy and liberty interest” for consensual sex, then anything goes.
If government can’t ban homosexual acts, the senator
reasoned, then it can’t ban “polygamy,” “bigamy,” “incest” or
“adultery.” The senator also apparently mentioned a form of trans-species
sex, but that was left out of the final published interview.
In an odd way, Santorum was making a legitimate point.
If the Supreme Court finds a “privacy and liberty
interest” for private homosexual conduct, then all government—state, local
and national—will lose its grip on the bedroom.
The senator thinks that will be a bad thing and many
people agree with him. Many don’t, but that’s what makes America such an
interesting place.
Santorum’s problem is not in his analysis but in his
extremely poor choice of words. In the interview, he seemed to be equating
homosexuals with incestuous step-fathers, polygamous mountain men and a
peculiar breed of animal lovers.
That kind of comparison was tough to stomach publicly,
even for compassionate conservatives.
The truth is that in Washington too many gays and
lesbians are out of the closet for this kind of dreck to pass for wisdom.
Everybody has a gay cousin or friend or co-worker. There are gays working in
the White House. There are even gays on congressional staffs.
They all seem pretty normal to me.
Many Republicans, probably after watching an episode of
“Will and Grace,” are scrambling to put some distance between themselves
and Santorum’s comments.
Democrats are jumping on the interview as if it were a
piece of red meat.
Some are calling for Santorum to step down from his
leadership position in the Senate—Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., had to step down
as majority leader last year after publicly musing how nice it would have been
if the racist Dixiecrats had defeated Harry Truman in 1948.
What flabbergasts Washington insiders, and I’m sure
other Republican leaders, is that Santorum is no neophyte, and his misstep
came so soon after Lott’s.
Santorum is a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania; he didn’t
just fall off the turnip truck. He’s the third-ranking Republican in the
Senate, serving since 1995. According to his own official biography, he’s
“a high profile spokesman for the party.”
What’s worse is that Santorum still doesn’t get it.
In a statement released earlier this week, the senator
claimed to have been blind-sided by a “misleading” story. The interview
was supposed to have been a “profile”—read puff piece—talking about
his eight years in the Senate.
“When discussing the pending Supreme Court Case
Lawrence vs. Texas, my comments were specific to the right to privacy and the
broader implications of a ruling on other state privacy laws,” Santorum said
in the statement.
The senator said he was just echoing the concerns of
constitutional scholars.
“I am a firm believer that all are equal under the
Constitution,” he added. “My comments should not be misconstrued in any
way as a statement on individual lifestyles.”
Fair enough.
In the end, the Supreme Court will probably agree with
Santorum.
Most of the justices will not find a “privacy and
liberty interest” that protects consenting adults from government snooping
in the bedroom.
At least I don’t think they will, though there is an
outside chance, given their comments from the bench during last month’s
argument.
But a majority of the justices almost certainly will
agree with the senator that “all are equal under the Constitution,” and
will strike down the Texas statute on that basis.
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