Parents
of Gays: Santorum Stunk
They say senator ignored their efforts to show him
human side of controversy
Philadelphia
Daily News, May 3, 2003
400 N. Broad St., Philadelphia, PA 19101
Fax: 215-854-5691
Email: dailynews.opinion@phillynews.com
By Regina Medina, medinar@phillynews.com
Melina Waldo showed U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum a picture of
her 31-year-old gay son.
But Santorum, she said, barely glanced at it.
“I wanted to touch his heart; I wanted to make him
understand why I was upset,” she said, explaining she had been trying to
appeal to him as one parent to another.
Santorum spoke with Waldo, and her husband, Richard, of
Haddonfield, N.J., and with Center City residents Fran and Allen Kirschner
Thursday in Washington for what they thought would be an open discussion about
his recent comments about homosexuality.
Instead, they said, the meeting at times turned testy,
with the beleaguered senator sticking to his controversial remarks.
Santorum, the third-ranked leader of the Senate, created
a firestorm recently after commenting on a sodomy case out of Houston pending
before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Saying he opposed overturning sodomy laws, Santorum told
the Associated Press, “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.”
The parents who met with the embattled senator expressed
hurt over his remarks.
But rather than listening to how they felt, Santorum
“kept referring to the law of the land,” recalled Fran Kirschner, who
heads the Philadelphia chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbian and Gays.
“He kept lecturing us on the right to privacy, and
[told us] ‘You don’t know the law,’” said Waldo, who is involved with
the Catholic Parents Network, a support group for Catholic parents of gays.
“He said he’s a lawyer and I’m not—and, of
course, I couldn’t possibly understand it.”
Erica Clayton Wright, a spokeswoman for Santorum,
described the meeting as “a very professional and polite exchange,”
according to the New York Times. She declined to give further details.
“Constituent meetings are private.”
The Daily News was unsuccessful in reaching Santorum
yesterday.
Kirschner, who called the encounter “disappointing,”
said the aim of the meeting had not been “to argue the law. We went there to
put a face on the families of Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Gay and Transgender
children.”
Waldo, whose husband appeared last night on Fox News
Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” said she had been surprised that
Santorum was not “a little more savvy in dealing with people. Maybe a little
more conciliatory.”
When the meeting ended, Santorum abruptly left, according
to the two mothers.
“He was in a big hurry to get out,” said Kirschner.
“He just wanted to be done with it.”
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