Last edited: January 29, 2005


‘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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