It’s really helpful to read Senator Rick Santorum’s full remarks to the AP reporter Lara Jakes Jordan. (My piece for Salon, posted opposite, was based on the truncated version released two days ago.) It turns out that once again, an important quote has been bungled by a journalist. Here’s the critical quote:
[I]f 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.
Santorum did not say, as the AP had it, “the right to (gay) consensual sex within your home,” and it’s clear he didn’t mean it either. (In a good piece, the New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, gets the quote right). Santorum meant any sex outside heterosexual, married, procreative sex. And he’s insistent in opposing any tolerance by the government of sexual desires or wants that the government deems a threat to society:
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.
Wow. I’ve long heard of people talking about individual rights against the government. I have rarely heard about the government’s rights against the individual. And from a Republican! Notice how Santorum uses the pronoun “we” when referring to the state. He’s been in power too long. Has Santorum heard of limited government? It was once a conservative idea, you know, Senator.
CRIMINALIZING SEX: Now there are two issues here: there’s a Constitutional issue about whether the Constitution enshrines an absolute right to privacy, which is a matter of genuine scholarly and legal debate. Then there’s a political issue about whether as a political matter, voters should support laws that criminalize private adult consensual sexual activity. Santorum is clear in his remarks that he neither believes that the Constitution protects such privacy; and that he would support laws that would criminalize many private consensual sexual acts. He backs sodomy laws. (“If New York doesn’t want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn’t agree with it, but that’s their right.” [emphasis added]) He therefore believes that if I were to have sex with my boyfriend in my own bedroom, I should be liable to cops’ raiding my apartment and throwing me in jail. (At the same time, he says he has “absolutely nothing” against homosexuals. Nada.) His subsequent comments also strongly imply that he would allow the cops to come into private homes to police heterosexual adultery as well. Or, in Santorum’s world, the cops could enter someone’s house to see whether a man was having sex with two women or more than two women on a continuous basis (that would be private “bigamy” or “polygamy”). In fact, any activity that could be construed by Santorum as “antithetical to strong, healthy families” could theoretically be outlawed. I don’t know about you, but this vision of what should constitute government power in a free society worries the bejeezus out of me. In fact, it’s one of the most extremist, big-government comments I’ve ever heard from a sitting U.S. Senator. And he’s not even a liberal.
NOT ABOUT GAYS: The response to Santorum has been primarily that his remarks were bigoted about gays. Santorum claims they weren’t. I disagree but, as with Trent Lott, I can’t look into a person’s heart and know whether he is animated by hate or not. But homosexuality isn’t the real point here. The point is that Santorum is proposing a politics that would essentially abolish domestic sexual privacy – for all of us, if we deviate from “correct” sexual practice. Many social conservatives, I think, may oppose same-sex marriage or gays in the military, but most don’t want to send the cops into bedrooms across America to jail gay citizens. They may disapprove of adultery, but still not want the police investigating. They see the difference between what is publicly normative and what is privately permitted. They adhere, like the vast majority of fair-minded people, to the very American notion of live-and-let-live. Even Bill Kristol has publicly said he opposes anti-sodomy laws. But Santorum, in these remarks, clearly doesn’t. What he disapproves of mustn’t only be denied public recognition; it must be criminalized. If you think I’m exaggerating, read his full comments. They are not a relic of a bigoted past, as Trent Lott’s were. But they are an expression of a bleak future, in which tolerance and privacy are subject to the approval of “moral” majorities and enforced by the police. If that truly is his view, he needs to explain it further. And the Republican party has to ask itself if it wants an unconservative extremist as one of its leaders.
The Dish 