Month: April 2003

The first Senate Republican repudiation of Senator Santorum’s disgraceful comments about gay people’s relationships emerged today. Here’s Snowe: “Discrimination and bigotry have no place in our society, and I believe Senator Santorum’s unfortunate remarks undermine Republican principles of inclusion and opportunity.” You can say that again. But Chafee gets the real issue, which is not about gays as such, but about privacy and the power of government to police everyone’s bedrooms: “I thought his choice of comparisons was unfortunate and the premise that the right of privacy does not exist – just plain wrong. Senator Santorum’s views are not held by this Republican and many others in our party.” What a relief that some leaders are prepared to take this extremism on. And what does it say about the president and Bill Frist that they won’t?

KURTZ PUNTS: Stanely Kurtz’s critique of the New York Times’ coverage and defense of the “slippery slope” argument in terms of constitutional law are completely fair enough (even though I disagree). But they are not the point. Stanley simply ignores the implications of Santorum’s full comments, which clearly place Santorum in the position of believing that homosexual relationships should be criminalized, as well as equating homosexuality with child abuse and bestiality. Santorum’s full remarks reveal exactly that. Why does Stanley ignore what is clearly in the public record? Why is it up to decent Republicans like Tony Blankley and Jonah Goldberg to state the obvious? The answer is that many establishment Republicans believe that the criminalization of private gay sex is a legitimate position, even when they personally disagree with it. That’s how close they are to the fundamentalist right. That’s how little they care about individual liberties. I guess, as so many gloating liberals have emailed me to point out, I have been incredibly naive. I expected a basic level of respect for gay people from civilized conservatives. I’ve always taken the view that there are legitimate arguments about such issues as marriage rights or military service and so on; and that fair-minded people can disagree. And, of course, there are many fair-minded people among Republicans and conservatives who do not agree with Santorum, and I am heartened by their support, especially the Republican Unity Coalition and Marc Racicot, RNC head. But something this basic as the freedom to be left alone in own’s own home is something I naively assumed conservatives would obviously endorse – even for dispensable minorities like homosexuals. I was wrong. The conclusions to be drawn are obvious.

The blog today is again devoted to the now-amplified comments of the third leading Republican in the Senate. I make no apologies for this. This is not about homosexuality as such. It is about the principles of limited government, tolerance, civility, compassion and the soul of the Republican party. There are no deeper political issues. No war is worth fighting if our political leaders feel contempt for basic liberties at home. I realized this more profoundly after reading Santorum’s full remarks, which are far more alarming than the small, doctored quote that created the immediate fuss. If you care about basic liberties in the privacy of your own home, read Santorum’s attack on them, my arguments below, and make your own mind up. My own position is similar to this reader’s:

As a Christian, a conservative, and a registered Republican, I am shocked and appalled (well, maybe appalled and a little less shocked than I’d like to be) at Senator Santorum’s comments. I cannot believe that this is what passes for conservative thought these days. I was raised a conservative by two very conservative parents who always told me that they were conservative because they didn’t like the government telling them what they could and could not do, especially in the privacy of their own home. Being a conservative always seemed to be about individual freedom and liberty to them, and it is one of the things that has led me back to conservatism after a brief (and fictitious, ultimately) hiatus somewhere left of center. Now, I feel ashamed to be a registered Republican and am beginning to regret that post-9/11 moment when I decided that the Republican party was dead right on international and foreign affairs and headed in the right direction on domestic issues, headed back to their conservative roots on issues such as these sodomy laws. To deny those who might choose, as free adults, in the privacy of their own home, to engage in behavior that is opposed to another’s morality, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual, is repugnant to my notions of conservatism. If Santorum is somehow representative of what is conservatism in the United States today, then I say no thank you to it.

Me too.

There are a couple of points about the Santorum controversy that are worth re-examining. The first is his problem with the Constitutional right to privacy. As I said yesterday, this is a perfectly respectable position, and one with which I have some sympathy. My preference would be for Texas voters to throw out this invasive and discriminatory law. My second choice would be for the Court to strike down the law on the grounds of equal protection, in as much as it criminalizes the same “offense” for one group of people (gays) but not for another (straights). But as a simple matter of constitutional fact, the right to privacy is very well entrenched. More to the point, one critical precedent for it, as Santorum concedes, is the Griswold ruling, protecting couples from state interference in their use of contraception. Now what is the real difference – in Santorum’s moral universe – between contraception and non-procreative sex, i.e. sodomy? I don’t see any myself. From a Catholic viewpoint, they are morally indistinguishable. So the question emerges: if Santorum believes, for religious reasons, that people should be jailed for private gay sex, why does he not think people should be jailed for the use of contraception? If his goal, for civil reasons, is “strong, healthy families,” then contraception might even be more problematic than gay sex. It actually prevents heterosexuals from forming families at all. Does Santorum therefore endorse making contraception illegal? Would he allow the cops to police this in people’s bedrooms? Will anyone ask him these obvious questions? Of course not.

SLIPPERY, SLIPPERY: The second issue is whether his point about a “slippery slope” from non-procreative sex to incest to polygamy, and so on, is valid. Where do we draw the line in policing private sexual behavior? My golden rule in matters of limited government is an old and simple one. It is that people should be free to do within their own homes anything they want to, as long as it is consensual, adult and doesn’t harm anyone else. Bigamy and polygamy are therefore irrelevant here. Bigamy means being married to more than one woman; polygamy, likewise, means being married to more than two women. There’s nothing inconsistent between saying you don’t want such marriages to be legal (I don’t) and also saying that what people do sexually in their own homes should be their own business, and not the government’s. Do I think it should be a crime for a man to have sex with two women at once? Or an orgy? Nope. It’s none of mine or the state’s business. And that applies to having live-in long-term girlfriends, or any other type of consenting private relationship people might want. The only relevant issue is if a child – an involuntary participant in this private set-up – is the result of such relationships, in which case, we have another party involved, who might be harmed in some way. (This is also, for many, the issue with abortion and privacy.) That changes the equation, and makes some state interference defensible. Incest is more complicated, but it also fails the test because it involves the possibility of a child, in this case subject to physical problems as well as severe emotional ones. What these cases show is that the state’s interest in policing private sex should only be related, and then only at some considerable distance, to the protection of children. But all this shows is that the case of private gay sex is perhaps the relationship that the government should be least concerned about. Why? Because it’s the one least likely to involve children. In fact, as a sexual act, it’s the only one that will never lead to children. So why, one wonders, is it the relationship that Santorum most wants to police? Hmmm.

CRIMINALIZING ADULTERY? Now let me turn the slippery slope argument around. Santorum argues that I should be jailed for having private consensual sex with my boyfriend in my own home. (He lets it slip at the end of the interview when he says: ” 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…” [My italics.]) Why does he believe this? Because, somehow, my relationship prevents others from forming “strong, healthy families.” I have no idea how my relationship has such a bad effect on others – but leave that for a moment. If that is the criterion for the government to police our bedrooms, then why should not adultery be criminal? It has a far, far more direct effect on “strong, healthy families”. It’s far, far more common than gay sex – hurts children, destroys families, wounds women, and on and on. To argue that gay sex should be illegal but adultery shouldn’t be, makes no sense at all. Again, Santorum must be asked if he believes adultery should be criminalized. Will anyone ask that? Not on Fox News.

Which gets us to the question of bigotry. I hate this term; and very rarely use it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If you care to, read Santorum’s full remarks again. When you do, you begin to understand why he was the protege of Trent Lott. His first comments about homosexuals relate to the recent crisis in the Catholic Church:

In this case, what we’re talking about, basically, is priests who were having sexual relations with post-pubescent men. We’re not talking about priests with 3-year-olds, or 5-year-olds. We’re talking about a basic homosexual relationship. Which, again, according to the world view sense is a a perfectly fine relationship as long as it’s consensual between people.

“Post-pubescent men.” What a bizarre term. They were minors! Doesn’t that make a difference? In fact, isn’t their being under-age the entire criminal issue here? Not to Santorum. In his view, the abuse of minors is a “basic homosexual relationship.” In this quote, Santorum conflates the abuse of minors with adult homosexual relationships. He calls every homosexual in a relationship the equivalent of a child-molester. That is a despicable charge and Santorum must withdraw it. For good measure, Santorum then equates any same-sex relationships – faithful or unfaithful – with adultery. Subsequently, his attention wanders onto marriage where he opines:

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. It is one thing.

Here, homosexual relationships are associated with bestiality and – again – child abuse. (In the sentence beginning, “It’s not, you know, man on child, …” the “It’s” clearly refers to marriage, not homosexuality. The referent is picked up again with: “It [i.e. marriage] is one thing.”)

YOU DECIDE: Santorum, of course, doesn’t believe he’s prejudiced against gay people. I wonder if he knows any, or any work for him, or have ever worked for him. He claims his remarks are only pertinent to the Texas case before the Supreme Court. That’s a lie, as anyone reading the transcript can attest. He further says he has nothing against homosexuals, except that if they ever want to express their homosexuality in an actual intimate and physical love, it’s the equivalent of molesting a child or having sex with a dog, and they should be put in jail for it. That’s what the Christian far-right means by “compassion.” In the abstract, I suppose you could argue that if you have no problems with celibate homosexuals, then you’re not a homophobe. Some saintly people might fall into that category, and I wouldn’t like to say it isn’t possible. But in practice, I’m really not so sure. It’s hard to find the right analogy, but 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.) Worse actually. It’s like saying that, even if Jews practised their religion at home, in private, they could still be arrested for undermining the social order. Their very persistence in their identity – which harms and could harm no-one else – is a threat. Do you think someone who said that would remain a leading pillar of the Republican Party?

It behooves me to mention William F Buckley’s recent National Review column where he seems, in his usual elegant fashion, to side against sodomy laws. Good for WFB. (He tries to imply, however, that the Texas case was a set-up by pro-gay advocates looking for a test case. In fact, the arrests were the result of a malicious neighbor with a grudge against the couple.) Buckley has true conservative principles, of course. And he has a long history of defending private consensual adult behavior in which neither party is harmed. His critical sentence is: “The Texas law says that gays cannot do what non-gays can do, and the facts of the matter weigh against Texas.” Exactly. Santorum avoids that issue entirely, and seems to know next to nothing about the Texas case. The real question for Santorum is whether he supports the enforcement of sodomy laws for straights. I presume he does. After all, if you’re really interested in maintaining public morality and strong families, why would you allow sodomy for straights (for whom it is a choice over reproductive sex) and ban it for gays (who couldn’t reproduce or have biological children if they tried.) Think about that: the number three Republican senator wants to allow the cops to police the bedrooms of straight couples to make sure there aren’t any blowjobs. That’s how far out there he is. The rest of the GOP is maintaining silence. Thanks, guys. We get the message. As one reader put it, “I was warming to the Republicans over Iraq. But statements like these have me running back to the Democrats.” I can fully see why.

Good for Romesh Ponnuru, who at least manages to say something about Santorum. But then he says that I’m exaggerating. Ponnuru should become a lawyer his parsing of Santorum’s comments are so, well, fine. Ponnuru says that all Santorumm is saying is that no courts should stop people from selectively (or even unselectively) enforcing sodomy laws and that there’s no “valid moral principle that prohibits the governmental policing of consensual sexual behavior.” That, according to Ponnuru, isn’t radical or extreme at all. I guess that depends what you mean by moral or valid. Could there be such a “valid, moral” principle barring the state from arresting people in their own homes for consensual sex? How about the dignity and freedom of the human person – that he or she should be allowed a zone of privacy, especially in sexual affairs, that is immune from government intervention? Does Ponnuru think that moral case is invalid?

THE BACK-FLIP: But then he contradicts himself by conceding that Santorum – as a simple practical, empirical matter, regardless of any such “valid moral principles” – supports anti-sodomy laws. Ponnuru disagrees with Santorum on this: “Wrong, Santorum may be. I think he is wrong on the question of whether states should ban sodomy.” Ponnuru lets Santorum off the hook because he doesn’t see any evidence of Santorum wanting the laws enforced. Don’t you love this new conservative approach to the law – that it can be ignored if necessary? I don’t remember them making that argument during president Clinton’s impeachment. But the real problem is deeper. Like so many other conservatives, Ponnuru stays mum on the question of sodomy laws except deep in a defense of someone attacking them. But if National Review had a shred of consistency in its own arguments, it would take on sodomy laws as a matter of conservative principle. Even Stanley Kurtz opposes them. Even Bill Kristol. I’ve personally asked Kurtz several times to write about the subject. Silence. I’ve asked other conservative editorialists to do the same (those who agree with me on the subject). Silence. The best you can hope for is the Wall Street Journal referring to these laws as an “anachronism,” an anachronism that recently threw two people into jail. What exactly would it take to get conservatives to defend the principle of limited government and individual privacy? That it not involve any defense of homosexuals? Look at their defense of privacy when it comes to “outing” people. They have a fit (and rightly so) when some journalist dares ask questions about someone’s sexual orientation. But when the government comes crashing through someone’s bedroom door, they look politely the other way. Don’t they see how transparent their double standards are? Or do they only care about these issues when it could affect “someone like them”?

AVOIDANCE ISSUES: It seems to me that the genteel form of conservative obtuseness to homosexual dignity and freedom now comes in this form (these are, obviously, my words):

I don’t personally want to jail people for private sex; but as long as it’s homosexuals alone who are subject to this invasion of privacy, I’m not going to get too exercised about it. If I did, I’d upset a few of my friends on the far right, and, heavens, we cannot afford a real fight over this. And, anyway, they don’t enforce these laws, do they? Except when they do. They’re being abolished anyway. Why should I add my voice to a chorus that’s winning? And, (now talking to himself) isn’t good for the homosexuals to be just a little scared that they could get arrested? Deters a few. Sends the right message. Keeps them in their place, after all. Ensures that our public morality is, well, heterosexual. This is the status quo and it’s not too uncomfortable, is it? Well, I don’t find it uncomfortable. That Sullivan, fine fellow in some ways. What a pity he’s so obsessed by these personal issues. A few people’s lives ruined for doing something I’ve sometimes done with my girlfriend isn’t too high a price to pay for conservative unity, is it? It’s not as if there’s a valid moral principle involved here.

This is the voice of conservative excuse-making. It sickens me.

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.

Kinda. Meanwhile, a “French official” tells the International Herald Trib that Chirac is about engage in a period of “rhetorical adjustment.” Heh.

HITCH IN TROUBLE: He’s been haranguing the missus again.

NOT SANTORUM: These Republicans are, well, psychedelic.

THE ALLEGED TRAITOR: Intelligence experts say the documents apparently incriminating anti-war campaigner George Galloway check out. Was he paid off by Saddam? The British government starts to investigate his “charity” and its funding. The Labour Party starts an investigation into what it calls “extremely serious” allegations. FYI: The Treason Act 1351 is still active, making it a crime, punishable by life in prison to “be adherent to the king’s [now queen’s] enemies in his realm or elsewhere”. If he’s guilty, send him to the Tower!

The Labour deputy has now redoubled his denials and is threatening to sue the Daily Telegraph. I can’t say his statement settles the matter. It sure doesn’t convince me. The reporter explains to the Guardian:

“Nobody steered me in that direction at all. We just went and purely by chance we stumbled across this room which had these files in it, and again purely by chance we came across these files which carried the label Britain. And it was two days before we had actually gone through the contents and found this document. I find it very hard to believe that this document is not authentic. I think it would require an enormous amount of imagination to believe that someone went to the trouble of composing a forged document in Arabic and then planting it in a file of patently authentic documents and burying it in a darkened room on the off-chance that a British journalist might happen upon it and might bother to translate it. That strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable.”

The story is now leading every major British news source, so we’ll find out soon enough. But the full implications of this story for the anti-war movement are epic.

DEAN, THE E-CANDIDATE: ABC News asks an interesting question: how come outsider, purist know-it-all candidate Howard Dean has amassed $2.6 million already? The answer is partly the internet. I smell a McCain-like campaign.

THE FAR RIGHT’S ANGER: One sign of the domestic moderation of the Bush administration is that some elements of the religious right are furious. Not so long ago, RNC chair Marc Racicot visited the Human Rights Campaign, the major gay rights group. The Family Research Council has gone nuts about this. FRC’s head, Kenneth Connor, claims that the party chair shouldn’t meet with groups who disagree with official party platform policy. Does that mean that no Republican president should ever address the NAACP, I wonder? Or Hispanic or Jewish groups who don’t agree with everything in the GOP platform? Connor further says that the GOP believes that homosexuality is incompatible with military service. But even the Pentagon doesn’t believe that, and allows closeted homosexuals (and increasingly some not-so-closeted ones) to serve their country. Rcaicot was right to reach out to gays and lesbians. He’s right to implicitly deny that being gay-inclusive and pro-family is somehow an incoherent or un conservative position. Gays are members of families;they always have been and always will be. The question is whther they will be pushed out of family life or included in it. In his private email, Connor calls HRC “a radical organization working to advance an extremist agenda.” This is baloney. I know the gay left; and HRC is the gay center. They increasingly understand thay many gays are conservative and moderate and have intelligently reached out to conservative thinkers, writers and politicians. Heck, Jonah Goldberg and David Brooks addressed the same conference as Racicot. The Bush administration needs to know that its impulse for inclusion is the right one; in fact, it’s the only one that will give the GOP a healthy and moral future.

BBC WATCH: They also tend to get their basic science reporting wrong.

If this turns out to be true, it’s a bombshell. The chief left-wing anti-war campaigner in Britain’s parliament, Labour Party MP George Galloway, has his name on several documents discovered in Baghdad by the Daily Telegraph. The documents allegedly show a huge pay-off scheme from Saddam’s oil profits to the anti-war activist – worth up to $500,000 a year – in return for his political work in defense of Saddam. Here are the relevant documents. Here are details of the alleged Jordanian go-between. Galloway has denied the allegations thus:

Asked to explain the document, he said yesterday: “Maybe it is the product of the same forgers who forged so many other things in this whole Iraq picture. Maybe The Daily Telegraph forged it. Who knows?” When the letter from the head of the Iraqi intelligence service was read to him, he said: “The truth is I have never met, to the best of my knowledge, any member of Iraqi intelligence. I have never in my life seen a barrel of oil, let alone owned, bought or sold one.”

Not exactly a clear denial, I’d say. Notice the Clintonian “maybes” and “to the best of my knowledge.” Notice that Galloway doesn’t clearly deny receiving laundered oil money either. I imagine the Telegraph must be pretty confident of its source materials, but I cannot independently verify them, of course. And I haven’t seen the story picked up yet by anyone else. But this is the lead story in the largest-selling quality newspaper in Britain. If confirmed, it couldn’t be more damaging to a man synonymous in Britain with the anti-war movement. It will be fascinating to see how that movement responds in the coming days to the notion that one of its key figures may actually have been on the dictator’s pay-roll. It will be even more fascinating if any other such documents turn up.