You can find the full text of the relevant section of the interview at the Washington Post. And, in fact, we do learn something from looking at these remarks in context: we learn that Santorum's homophobia is merely one aspect of his all-embracing hatred of sexual freedom. What he's going after here is not so much me and my GBLT American brethren and sistren, but privacy itself. Santorum only got onto the topic via his explanation of why the Catholic Church itself is not responsible for the fact that its priests were molesting their parishioners:
"You have the problem within the church. Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it's in the privacy of your own home, this 'right to privacy,' then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it's private, as long as it's consensual, then don't be surprised what you get. You're going to get a lot of things that you're sending signals that as long as you do it privately and consensually, we don't really care what you do. And that leads to a culture that is not one that is nurturing and necessarily healthy. I would make the argument in areas where you have that as an accepted lifestyle, don't be surprised that you get more of it."
I see...the problem with the Catholic Church is that it's TOO accepting of homosexuality. Thanks, Rick, it all makes sense now.
Apart from the sheer absurdity of his 'explanation' for the scandal of priest/parishioner sexual abuse, what should really bother any American who reads this paragraph is the way he talks about "this 'right to privacy'" as if it is some kind of newfangled and highly dubious notion which must be stamped out immediately lest it destroy American society. Because what this paragraph shows you is not that Santorum wants to regulate the sexual behavior of gay people, but that he wants to regulate the sexual behavior of EVERYONE.
That gets even more disturbing when you think about what this passage reveals about his own sexual values. It isn't simply that he seems to think tolerance is a *bad* thing, or that he seems to want to define any 'lifestyle' he doesn't personally approve of as "deviant." No, what's really startling is that he's also attacking the principle of consensuality.
This is important because consensuality is the only construct that makes it possible possible to regulate, legislate, or even discuss sexual ethics *without* appealing to the authority of organized religion. The principle Santorum so glibly dismisses--"there is no deviant as long as it's private, as long as it's consensual"--is the mechanism through which we bring the foundational principles of American democracy to bear on an area that the Founding Fathers probably never dreamt of dealing with. Since, in a country where there is no established state religion, sexuality cannot and should not be regulated according to Biblical prohibition or Shari'a law, we must go to our secular values; and of these none is more cherished than liberty. And that's what both privacy and consensuality are about.
Consensuality is (among liberals, anyhow) the test for whether a sexual practice is tolerable because consensuality is what protects individual freedom. A sexual act is 'consensual' when all participants choose it freely. This, of course, implies that all participants must be free to choose, which is why we have laws that prohibit sex with people who are *not* free to choose it--children, for instance. It is also why we liberals are down on things like sexual harassment, in which an employer attempts to force sexual contact on someone who is not free to choose it. And it is also why the problem with priest/parishioner sex--again, from the perspective of someone who's *not* Rick Santorum--is not that it was sometimes male/male, but that it was *always* forced on people who were not free to choose it.
So to pretend that the liberal attitude toward sexuality is "what the hell, anything goes, dogs, goats, children, whatever, we're cool with it" is not only disingenuous, it's very, very dangerous. Because, as Santorum's interview shows, the only way to do that is by rejecting the principle on which liberal/secular sexual ethics are actually founded: the right to choose when, how, and with whom you share your body. And once we throw that out, we are all in *very big trouble.*
Does this interview display Santorum's rampant homophobia and bigotry? Absolutely. Does it recap every wrong-headed, hurtful, and damaging stereotype the right has ever promulgated about homosexuality? You bet your bippy. And it does do this lesbian's heart good to see him getting raked over the coals for that. But let's not allow the surface problems with his remarks to obscure the root cause. Here's the chunk that got him into trouble with the HRC:
"And 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. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does."
As any gay person you know will be happy to point out, comparing homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery is both inaccurate and unfair. Yours truly, for instance, is as lesbian as the day is long; yours truly has also faithfully loved the same woman for fourteen wonderful years and intends to live and die happily married to her without ever being tempted by the blandishments of bigamy, polygamy, or adultery. As for incest, well, if Rick Santorum can't tell that there's a clear ethical, moral, and legal difference between consensual sex amongst unrelated adults and parents screwing their children, well, all I can say is that I fear for his family.
But let's not let the hatred and disgust that blazes forth in that passage distract us from the real issue. Here's how he finishes that thought:
"It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold - Griswold was the contraceptive case - and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you - this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family."
The man can't make it any clearer than that, folks: he's not just anti-gay, he's anti-freedom. Well, I hope the folks in the House cafeteria will remember that if he drops in, and be careful not to serve him any fries.
So that's the 'context' of Santorum's homophobic remarks. We can all sleep better tonight knowing that his homophobia is just a more specific form of a malady common to many on the right these days: freedomphobia.
@#$!!,
The Plaid Adder
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