Originally published May 9, 2003, in The Washington Blade .
ON APRIL 19, the day before the notorious AP interview with Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pa., appeared, the Salt Lake Tribune ran an AP story featuring Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, talking about polygamy.
At a town meeting Hatch attended in southern Utah, the director of an anti-polygamy group said that teenage girls in nearby Hildale were forced into plural marriages, and he asked how children could be raped and nothing was done about it. Hatch replied that of course children should not be raped, but said, "I wouldn't throw accusations around unless you know they're true." He went on, "I'm not here to justify polygamy. All I can say is, I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people."
As the Church Lady would say, isn't that special? His disavowal notwithstanding, Hatch sounded more concerned about the rights of polygamists than about the plight of child brides. My point is not to call the senator soft on child rape, but to observe that politicians are influenced not just by religious beliefs (the elders of Hatch's Mormon faith renounced polygamy more than a century ago), but by calculations about voters. Senator Hatch has a lot of polygamists for constituents.
With the initial outrage and jokes on Santorum having run their course (Jay Leno, noting that the senator has a problem with gay sex, said, "Maybe he's just not doing it right"), those of us who wish to defend our privacy rights need to make political calculations of our own.
A few weeks before the 1993 gay march on Washington, Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., warned that gay cultural advances do not automatically translate into success at the ballot box. Referring to the upcoming march, he said that having a big party on the Mall is fine, but it would be more effective for gays to spend the price of first-class postage to mail letters to their senators and representatives.
Santorum's "love the sinner, hate the sin" stance - he has nothing against us, he just thinks we should be arrested if we act on our feelings - remains hard to dismiss in the Republican party because that party has a large, well-motivated constituency that agrees with him. As Andrew Sullivan observes, "It's not that far from saying that you have nothing against Jews, as long as they go to Church each Sunday. (Which was, of course, the Catholic position for a very long time.)"
When Senator Trent Lott, R-Miss., lamented the 1948 loss of Strom Thurmond's racist presidential campaign, and when Congressman Jim Moran, D-Va., blamed Jews for the war in Iraq, both men lost their respective leadership positions because of respect for black and Jewish citizens. Gays have made great strides politically, but we are well short of the goal of making homophobia political poison. In the last election, candidates from both major parties used anti-gay tactics against their opponents.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer have publicly defended Santorum, not for their stated reasons but because scapegoating gays is still largely accepted in the GOP. Alas, moderate Republicans like Senators Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., who repudiated Santorum's remarks, are rare outside New England. Republican leaders may be out of step with the moderate voters they need to win elections, but this must be proven on election day.
With all due respect to my fellow Democrats, who in general have been much more welcoming to gays, the answer is not simply partisan. Persuading and motivating voters is easier when you appeal to, rather than attack, their own values. Santorum's coercive worldview violates conservative principles of smaller government. Crusading to impose one's religious beliefs on others is distracting and spiritually corrupting. A governing majority for gay rights can best be achieved by making the conservative case for respecting gay families and not just the liberal one.
Democrats can try advancing gay equality by embracing traditional values such as "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" and respecting rather than scorning Middle America. Republicans, including my friends in Log Cabin who are fighting for the soul of their party, need to convince more candidates and local party organizations that catering to the fanaticism of the far right will cost them more votes in the long run than it will gain them.
In Pennsylvania as elsewhere, this means
working locally and statewide to promote winning alternatives to
the likes of Rick Santorum. The other side is working
too.