Dems
Call for Santorum to Resign Post
Associated Press, April 22,
2003 (excerpt)
WASHINGTON—The Senate
Democrats’ political organization on Tuesday called for Republican Sen. Rick
Santorum to resign his leadership position after the lawmaker compared
homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery.
One day after gay-rights groups urged GOP senators to
consider removing Santorum from his leadership post, the Democratic Senatorial
Campaign Committee said the two-term Pennsylvania senator should step down as
chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, the No. 3 job in the party
leadership.
The DSCC called Santorum’s remarks “divisive, hurtful
and reckless” and said they “are completely out of bounds for someone who
is supposed to be a leader in the United States Senate.”
In an interview with The Associated Press, Santorum
criticized homosexuality while discussing a pending Supreme Court case over a
Texas sodomy law.
“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to
consensual (gay) sex within your home, 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,” Santorum said in the
interview, published Monday.
Santorum spokeswoman Erica Clayton Wright said Monday
that the lawmaker’s comments were “were specific to the Supreme Court
case.” The senator’s office had no immediate comment Tuesday to the
DSCC’s call for him to give up his leadership job.
The DSCC also urged Santorum’s fellow Republican
senator, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, to repudiate the remarks. Specter, a
moderate Republican, is up for re-election in 2004 and faces a primary
challenge from conservative Republican Rep. Pat Toomey.
Questioned at the White House news briefing, press
secretary Ari Fleischer had no comment on Santorum’s remarks, saying he had
not seen the “the entire context of the interview. And ... I haven’t
talked to the president about it so I really don’t have anything to
offer.”
Separately, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry
issued a statement criticizing Santorum’s comments and assailing the White
House for remaining silent “while their chief lieutenants make divisive and
hurtful comments that have no place in our politics.”
“Every day in our country, gay and lesbian Americans
get up, go to work, pay their taxes, support their families and contribute to
the nation they love. These comments take us backwards in America,” said the
Massachusetts senator.
Democratic hopeful Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut said
Santorum “is wrong. The Texas law is unconstitutional and an insult to the
better America we need to build for all our people.” . . .
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