‘Anti-Gay’
Senator Condemned
US senators from the Democratic party have condemned
remarks by a Republican senator in which he compared homosexuality to incest
and adultery.
BBC
News, April 23, 2003
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee called
Senator Rick Santorum’s comments, made during an interview earlier this
month, “divisive, hurtful and reckless” and “completely out of bounds
for someone who is supposed to be a leader in the United States Senate”.
It called on Republican leaders to remove Mr Santorum
from his position as the Republican party’s conference chairman.
A leading Democratic presidential candidate also said
that Mr Santorum, the third-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, should
resign.
“Gay-bashing is not a legitimate public policy
discussion; it is immoral,” Howard Dean said in a statement.
“Rick Santorum’s failure to recognise that attacking
people because of who they are is morally wrong makes him unfit for a
leadership position in the United States Senate.”
‘Individual lifestyles’
Mr Santorum made the comments during an interview in
April, in reference to an upcoming US Supreme Court case on sodomy laws in the
US state of Texas.
He argued against the altering of the state’s current
laws, which outlaw homosexual anal sex. “If the Supreme Court says that you
have the right to consensual 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,” he said.
“I have no problem with homosexuality—I have a
problem with homosexual acts, as I would with acts of other, what I would
consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships.”
Mr Santorum later issued a statement saying that his
comments had been made purely in the context of the court case and “should
not be misconstrued in any way as a statement on individual lifestyles”.
‘In the mainstream’
Nonetheless gay rights activists said that the Republican
Party should act on his remarks.
“[We are] calling on Republican leaders to take quick
and decisive action to repudiate Senator Santorum’s remarks,” rights group
Human Rights Campaign said.
But some of Mr Santorum’s conservative colleagues in
the Republican party have been quick to defend him, arguing that his remarks
reflected US public opinion on the subject.
“I think that while some elites may be upset by those
comments, they’re pretty much in the mainstream of where most of the country
is,” former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer told the Associated
Press news agency.
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