IGF CultureWatch

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.

By now you've no doubt heard the flap about Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who, in response to a question about whether homosexual persons should remain celibate, stated that "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 slippery-slope argument linking homosexuality with polygamy has become a familiar rhetorical move in antigay rhetoric. Unfortunately, its use is not limited to those (like Santorum) whose mouths clearly move faster than their minds: there are a number of smart, thoughtful people who believe that the case for one lends support to the case for the other, and not all of these people are anti-gay.

But Santorum's version seems to go further than most. And it's not just because he extends the list from polygamy to incest, adultery, indeed, to "anything." It's because the thing that initiates Santorum's parade of horribles is not "homosexual sex" but simply "consensual sex." According to Santorum, if the Supreme Court says you have "the right to consensual sex within your home ... you have the right to anything."

Okay, so not everyone speaks in final draft. Maybe the "you" here refers to "you homosexuals." Or maybe Santorum thinks no one has a Constitutional right to consensual sex, and thus that laws limiting such activity are all Constitutional (which is not the same as saying that they're wise or justified).

Attention to the full text of the interview, as well as to follow-up interviews, suggests that Santorum didn't really know quite what he was saying, jumbling together some defensible constitutional concerns with radical views on privacy rights and a clear antipathy toward all things gay.

Santorum went on to argue that polygamy, adultery, sodomy, "all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family." In his view, the state's failure to regulate people's sex lives - even when they are consensual and private - "destroys the basic unit of our society."

Santorum is the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, so you might think the president would be a bit concerned about the image he's creating for the party. And Bush, finally, has weighed in. The "compassionate conservative," the man who so ardently defends freedom from oppressive religious regimes (but only where oil is involved), has come out in support of Santorum, calling him "an inclusive man."

Excuse me?

And then I thought about it for a while, and realized that the president is right.

Recall that Santorum claims that right to consensual sodomy entails not just the right to polygamy but indeed, to anything. Anything. Rape. Tax fraud. Mass murder. You name it. That's pretty damn inclusive.

Or consider Santorum's position on gay marriage: "In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

So, according to Santorum, gays' interest in securing marriage rights for their consensual adult relationships is not merely akin to polygamists' doing the same. It's also akin to "man on child" or "man on dog." That's pretty damn inclusive too.

(Although if he were really inclusive, he would have included "dog on man" as well. Why should the man always get to be on top?)

Santorum's "man on dog" comment was so surprising, it prompted the reporter to interrupt, "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about 'man on dog' with a United States senator; it's sort of freaking me out." Santorum's reply scaled new heights of inclusiveness: "And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire."

So Santorum thinks that the state needs to limit not just harmful behaviors, but "individuals' wants and passions." Lest you think this was a verbal slip, he repeated it again in response to the next question: "I've been very clear about that. The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don't agree with that."

(If this is being clear, I'd hate to see what he's like when he's being muddled.) What is clear is that Santorum thinks that your bedroom should be included among the places the state belongs.

If this is inclusiveness, count me out.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS all reasonable people can agree on. First, Democrats are better than Republicans on gay issues. Much better. Even when you find a gay-friendly Republican, his Democrat opponent is almost always better. Wherever there's an anti-gay initiative brewing, Republicans are stirring it. And when something idiotic is said about gays, it almost always comes from a Republican mouth.

The second thing reasonable people can agree on is that we'd be much better off if none of the above were true.

The real question has always been, how do we get from here to there?

One side says we should cozy up to the GOP, work from the inside to undermine homohaters, dispel stereotypes through our open participation in the party, and reward small Republican nods to equality in order to encourage more such progress.

The other side says we should just beat the GOP into submission.

Into this old debate walks Rick Santorum, the third-highest ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate. Ruminating on the constitutionality of anti-gay sodomy laws, Santorum recently told the Associated Press, "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 incest, you have the right to adultery."

Santorum quickly attempted to clarify these remarks, saying in a press release, "My discussion with The Associated Press was about the Supreme Court privacy case, [and] the constitutional right to privacy in general. ... My comments should not be misconstrued in any way as a statement on individual lifestyles."

The first Santorum statement suggests, "Courts will be unable to distinguish between gays and others, like polygamists and adulterers." It is a slippery-slope argument that says, in effect, "We must refuse to make a sound decision today for fear of having to make a sensible distinction tomorrow."

Santorum's second statement implies, "I, however, am personally able to distinguish gays from these others."

Does Santorum really believe that he can make simple distinctions while judges trained in making them cannot? The law is not a completely foreign thing. The kinds of arguments you make to your friends are often made, in specialized language, to courts.

One could persuasively argue to a person of sound mind that gay sex in itself is not socially harmful and so can safely be protected as a "right" against the nosy preferences of other citizens. But polygamy, incest, and adultery are socially harmful and shouldn't be similarly protected as "rights." (That's not to say they should necessarily be criminalized.) Plural marriage in modern times in our country would be unstable and would leave many people without a potential partner to care for and civilize them. Incest threatens to sexualize family relations. Adultery undermines a state-sanctioned and -supported union. And so on. It's not as if judges, unlike normal people, can't understand these arguments.

There's just no excuse for what Santorum said.

So what's the GOP's excuse for him? Critics of the Republican Party have made much of the fact that he could say such things and keep his job. Democrats called it proof that Republicans are all bigots. Indeed, although a handful of prominent Republicans criticized Santorum, most Republican leaders offered at least tepid support. Through his spokesperson, President Bush belatedly called Santorum "inclusive."

Still, the GOP is improving, incrementally. It's noteworthy that no Republican leader (other than the execrable Tom DeLay) has endorsed the substance of Santorum's actual comments, as opposed to defending the man's political position. I suspect they privately think his comments were ill-advised but were loath to lose a second top Senate leader over casual remarks in the space of six months.

The White House has taken no public stand on the pending Supreme Court sodomy case, though it could have, and in earlier era would have. While Bush doesn't have the gay-rights zeal of a PFLAG parent, he's done some positive things, like hiring openly gay people and retaining an executive order banning anti-gay discrimination in federal employment. The only people critical of him for this within his party are religious conservatives. Bush needs their support to win re-election and he's doing about as much as he can on gay issues without completely alienating that political base.

So how does the Santorum controversy affect the old debate about strategy between gay Republicans and gay GOP-bashers? The fact is, not much, because it doesn't alter two basic truths.

Both sides ignore that what is moving the Republican Party in the right direction more than anything else is a culture that's evolving to accept gays. The pace may seem slow but the overall direction has been one way. We might be able to nudge the party a little faster through one method or another, but whatever we do the GOP can't forever stay mired in a discredited past and hope to win elections in the future.

The other thing both sides ignore is that there is room for both strategies. We needn't put all our eggs in one political basket. Those of us who generally favor less regulation, lower taxes, and a strong national defense should stay and work inside the GOP, despite these occasional troglodyte eruptions. Those gays who favor "social justice" and worldwide peace through marches should throw stones at the GOP, despite gradual improvements.

Some see these divergent strategies as evidence of "division" when we need "unity." I say it's smart politics.