Last edited: January 31, 2005


Adultery, Incest, Whatever

Washington Post, April 24, 2003
1150 15th Street NW, Washington, DC 20071
Email: letterstoed@washpost.com

Put the legal framework aside for a moment and consider, simply, Sen. Rick Santorum’s list: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home,” he told an Associated Press reporter this week, “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.” By its grammatical construction this is a list of approximate equals, in this case equal in deviance. It may be broad-minded of Mr. Santorum (R-Pa.) to include adultery, as that must encompass some in his professional acquaintance. But that’s small comfort to those who oppose prejudice against homosexuals, now offensively lumped in by the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference with bigamists and those who practice incest, not to mention the vast Caligulan landscape that “anything” might encompass.

That said, the legal framework matters. This is not one of those offhand gaffes, like Sen. Trent Lott’s comparison of homosexuals with alcoholics and kleptomaniacs. As is clear from the longer transcript of the interview, Mr. Santorum is espousing a worldview, and a disturbing one. On one side are defenders of the “healthy, stable, traditional family.” On the other are practitioners of what he calls the “right-to-privacy lifestyle,” by which he means an attitude that “as long as it’s private, as long as it’s consensual,” it’s okay, even if deviant. Mr. Santorum favors the former attitude, which is his right. But then he takes it a step further. This right-to-privacy lifestyle “destroys the basic unit of our society,” he argues, and thus communities should be able to outlaw it if they wish. So “if New York doesn’t want sodomy laws . . . fine.” But if Texas or Pennsylvania do want sodomy laws, or adultery laws, that’s even finer.

So here we have a prominent Republican legislator advocating the right of states to sic their police on two consenting adults in their own home. You don’t have to be pro-”anything” to know what’s wrong with this. Bigamy and polygamy are not questions of privacy; they are regulated by the state as violations of a legal marriage contract. Whether states should sanction homosexual marriage is also a question of civil law, and a controversial one. But Mr. Santorum isn’t taking on that question; he’s advocating the criminalization of private behavior between two men or two women that (unlike, often, adultery) has no victims. The fact that many people disapprove of it does not justify sending the police to knock down doors and barge into bedrooms.

In his interview, Mr. Santorum said that he has “no problem with homosexuality,” just “homosexual acts.” This is a distinction made by others in his party and some of their favorite conservative theologians. They can choose to parse it however they wish. But people who choose differently should be left in peace.


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