Pundits
Say Santorum Will Survive
The
Advocate, April 29, 2003
Political analysts said they expect Sen. Rick Santorum to
remain popular in Pennsylvania despite a flap over his recent remarks about
homosexuality. “I think anybody who has followed Rick Santorum already knows
where he stands on gay rights,” said John Delano, a public policy professor
at Carnegie Mellon University. “He is a very conservative Republican.
Nothing new there, and it hasn’t hurt him yet.”
The recent outrage over Santorum’s comments isn’t the
first time that activists have taken to the street to lambaste his views on
homosexuality. In 1994 about 400 members of the group ACT UP blocked traffic
during a Republican fund-raiser on the same block, chanting “Rick Santorum,
go away! Racist, sexist, antigay!”
Millersville University political science professor G.
Terry Madonna said he doubted Santorum will lose many votes in a state where
being a social conservative is rarely seen as a liability. “I don’t think
this imperils him politically at all,” Madonna said.
Santorum said in an interview with the Associated Press
last week that he believed states had a right to ban gay sex or other private
behaviors that were “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional
family.”
“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,” he said. Santorum spokeswoman Erica Clayton Wright said the
lawmaker’s comments were “were specific” to a pending U.S. Supreme Court
case over a Texas sodomy law.
The remarks outraged gay rights groups, but the fallout
has been moderate compared to the lashing Sen. Trent Lott received for
praising Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign. White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Friday that Santorum is doing a good job as
party leader and is “an inclusive man.”
At St. Joseph’s University in suburban Philadelphia,
the student union asked the school to rescind an invitation to Santorum to
speak at a graduation ceremony on May 18. University trustees mulled over the
request Friday, then said the invitation would stand.
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