Last edited: January 30, 2005


An F in Logic

Even taken as Santorum meant it, his riff about gays is wrong-headed.

Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 2003
P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, PA 19101
Fax: 215-854-4483
Email: Inquirer.opinion@phillynews.com

Disturbing things can happen when two consenting adults sit down for an interview.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) recently consented to a wide-ranging discussion with a reporter in which he put homosexuality in a category with incest, bigamy and adultery. Here is the slippery slope Santorum envisions if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns a Texas sodomy law under review:

“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,” said the third-ranking Senate Republican. “You have the right to anything.”

Santorum said he has nothing against gays, mind you. He was, he later explained, making a constitutional point.

Make no mistake, the notion that a right to privacy is implicit in the Constitution drives social conservatives like the junior senator crazy, because it undergirds many court rulings they dislike, most notably Roe v. Wade.

But the way his words jumped easily from homosexuality to incest suggests that there’s just something about the idea of gays engaging in loving intimacy in the privacy of their home that the senator cannot abide.

The right to incest? It stretches reason beyond the breaking point to argue that courts can’t find a way to distinguish between gay sex and incest, which usually is tantamount to child abuse.

Equating the two insults the lifestyle of millions of American adults, while trivializing the criminal nature of assaulting children.

When someone as prominent and powerful as this senator says something like this, it is not some arcane think-tank discussion of judicial activism. Civil rights either protect real people leading real lives, or they don’t, with painful consequences. The law in question here permits the police to charge consenting adults with a crime for sexual acts inside their own home.

By the senator’s faulty logic, just about any behavior beyond “boy meets girl” can be lumped into the “deviant” category. Sometimes private behavior does cause grievous injury and deserves to be punished by society (e.g. sexual child abuse). But private acts between consenting gay adults fall under the category of allowing American citizens the freedom to lead their lives as they see fit if it causes no injury to others.

Social conservatives mount arguments that even loving, stable unions of same-sex couples somehow harm the institution of marriage. That leap baffles. It is fueled not by evidence, but by personal moral distaste.

Traditional families remain the foundation of our society; decriminalizing gay sex will not threaten that. The question is whether the heterosexual majority should be allowed to treat gays as second-class citizens. The answer is no.

Some have called for Santorum to resign from his leadership post. That’s for the Republican Party to decide. Santorum is a rising GOP star and many in the party’s base cheered his every word to the reporter.

Those facts may leave plenty of other Republicans, gay and heterosexual, with libertarian or moderate leanings, feeling uncomfortable today.

This incident underlines a running debate inside the GOP: Is it an inclusive party with room for multiple views on social issues, or is it fundamentally a party for people who share the senator’s moral viewpoint?

Put another away: Does the Big Tent have room only for celibate gays who yearn to be “cured”?


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