No
Compassion with Santorum in Leadership
Newsday,
April 24, 2003
By Michelangelo Signorile
Michelangelo Signorile is a former editor of The
Advocate, a national gay magazine, and author of “Queer in America”
and “Life Outside.”
The post-Trent Lott face of the Republican Party’s
leadership in the U.S. Senate revealed itself this week, pulling back the hood
of “compassionate conservatism.” And guess what? It’s not much different
from the old face, still trying to appeal to bigoted voters with a tailor-made
message.
Lott had nostalgic flashbacks to the days of segregation.
Now Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum—considered the third most powerful
Republican in the Senate and a one-time candidate to replace Lott as majority
leader—seems to be having flashbacks to the days of the Spanish Inquisition,
the Salem witch hunts and assorted other purges.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Santorum
brooded that the U.S. Supreme Court may soon strike down sodomy laws, which 14
states still have on the books. That apparently scares the daylights out of
Santorum. Decriminalizing sex between gays, he warns, may well be the end of
civilization, giving people the right to do ... “anything.”
“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to
consensual sex within your home,” Santorum claimed, “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 did generously make a distinction between
homosexuality and “man on dog” sex—that must be what they mean by
compassionate conservatism—but he also blamed the Catholic Church’s
pedophile scandal on homosexuality.
This is the kind of pap many of us thought went the way
of Jesse Helms—or Trent Lott himself, who in 1998 railed that homosexuality
is akin to kleptomania and alcoholism.
“You should try to show them a way to deal with that
problem,” Lott counseled, unaware of the problem of his own
narrow-mindedness.
Santorum’s comments on homosexuality are as much of a
throwback as Lott’s pining for a segregationist past. Even worse is that
Santorum, unlike Lott, says he has nothing for which to apologize. The
Republican Party likely believes that smearing gays, at this point in time, is
not as big a gaffe as are racially insensitive remarks. But if the party wants
to show that it has entered the 21st century with the rest of us, Santorum
should be ousted immediately as chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.
The Washington-based Human Rights Campaign and other gay
groups have rightly called on GOP leaders to do just that. But unlike in the
case of Lott, only Democrats have criticized Santorum for his remarks. Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist has defended Santorum, while the White House has
refused to address the issue. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle
and presidential hopefuls Sens. Joseph Lieberman and John Kerry have spoken
out strongly against Santorum. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, also seeking
the Democratic presidential nomination, has demanded that President George W.
Bush repudiate Santorum.
Don’t hold your breath. The president and his aides
have spoken out of both sides of their mouths on gay rights—when they’ve
spoken at all—playing to their religious right base while trying not to
alienate moderates. As governor, Bush supported sodomy laws, calling them a
“symbolic gesture of traditional values.” But the White House did not
offer a brief in Lawrence v. Texas, the case before the Supreme Court seeking
to overturn sodomy laws.
The strategy is to try to remain below the radar on the
issue while making mostly empty gestures. Last month, when Republican National
Committee head Marc Racicot spoke to the Human Rights Campaign and broadly
discussed “tolerance and inclusion” for gays, it was touted by some as an
example of the party’s newfound embrace of gay rights. A few religious right
groups complained, while the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay group, credited Bush
with changing the party and the RNC.
“This is another signal that the new Republican Party
under President Bush’s leadership is reaching out to all groups of
Americans,” Patrick Guerriero, the group’s leader, stated. “I think [Racicot’s]
remarks were honest and real and indicate a new willingness of the Republican
Party to reach out to folks, including gays.”
Not with Rick Santorum in a leadership role. And not with
the rest of the party, including the president, staying mum about his bigoted
bile.
Bigoted Words on ‘Bigot’
The
Columbian, May 1, 2003
P. O. Box 180, Vancouver, WA 98666
Fax: 360-699-6033
Email: letters@columbian.com
Letters
In reading Michelangelo Signorile’s April 27 opinion,
“Santorum should be ousted for remarks on gays,” I am puzzled. How can a
bigoted and intolerant stance toward U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., be the
basis for calling for the ouster of the senator for displaying bigotry and
intolerance?
Santorum expressed a moral value that reflects the
consensus view of Western civilization for hundreds of years. Signorile
expressed his values based on a viewpoint which has gained some ascendancy in
only the past 40 years. Signorile calls Santorum’s comments a throwback in
an apparent attempt to indicate that his viewpoint is necessarily better, but
he gives us no indication of why we should accept that.
Signorile makes comparisons to racism, although
discrimination based on race is very different from that based on behavior.
Our laws always discriminate on the basis of behavior, regardless of research
that may try to show a genetic basis for such behaviors.
Signorile certainly has the right to express his views
and try to change the laws, but I would ask him to do so without the
intolerance that he seems to abhor in others.
- Bob Bruechert, Vancouver
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