Senator
Santorum Sounds Off
New
York Times, April 22, 2003
229 W. 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036
Fax: 212-556-3622
Email: letters@nytimes.com
Hear ye, hear ye: Senator Rick Santorum feels obliged to
offer gratuitous guidance to the Supreme Court in the form of an ad hoc,
highly unlearned ruling that equates homosexuality with bigamy, polygamy,
incest and adultery.
“All those things are antithetical to a healthy,
stable, traditional family,” said Senator Santorum, Republican of
Pennsylvania, in comments to a reporter on a court challenge to Texas’ dated
and ludicrous ban on consensual gay sex at home. “If the Supreme Court says
that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the
right to bigamy,” the senator found in Santorum v. Reality. “Then you have
the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to
adultery. You have the right to anything.” How about the right to homophobia
as exercised by yet another ranking member of the Republican leadership? The
G.O.P. has not lived down the “Barney Fag” slur against Barney Frank by
Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, who was more swaggering than
apologetic about it. Senator Santorum insists that he was talking about
privacy more than about homosexuality, but his message was tailored for
retrograde loyalists.
Letters: The Furor Over Senator Santorum
New
York Times, April 25, 2003
229 W. 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036
Fax: 212-556-3622
Email: letters@nytimes.com
Re “Senator Santorum Sounds Off” (Topics of The
Times, April 23):
Why is it that the constitutional right to freedom of
speech seems to apply only to the liberal left? Right-wing conservatives
represent members of our country, too; don’t they get the same rights as
everyone else?
I would love to see the day when the extreme left
practices the same tolerance and acceptance for others that it so ferociously
espouses for itself.
- Kittredge White, New York
In “Senator Santorum Sounds Off” (Topics of The Times, April 23), you
castigate Senator Rick Santorum for his remarks about the relationship between
the ideals behind the push for judicial affirmation of homosexual lifestyles
and those of polygamists, bigamists and adulterers.
This parallels the response from other gay rights
supporters in two respects: avoiding the argument and mischaracterizing those
of us who support the senator’s remarks.
In no major statements criticizing the senator is anyone
confronting the substance of the argument itself: with a rhetoric focused on
tolerance of diverse lifestyles, it is absurd to claim that these groups,
polygamists especially, do not have an equal claim to judicial affirmation.
Furthermore, instead of dismissing Mr. Santorum as a
“retrograde” loyalist to traditional values, maybe people should consider
that the reason these issues are being addressed in the courts is that
democratic attempts to “embrace” homosexual lifestyles, such as through
expanding the definition of marriage, have failed.
- Michael F. Lorelli, Cambridge, Mass.
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