DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWNWARDS

Santorum Angers Gay Rights Groups (Alan Cooperman, April 22, 2003, Washington Post)

Gay rights groups called yesterday for Senate Republicans to repudiate remarks by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) comparing homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery.

Santorum made the remarks in an interview with the Associated Press about a Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of a Texas law against sodomy.

"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 polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything," Santorum said, according to the AP. [...]

The gay rights groups likened Santorum's remarks to those last December by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) extolling Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign. Accused of racism, Lott was forced to resign as majority leader.

"For the second time in a matter of months, we see a senior Republican leader in the Senate disparaging an entire group of Americans," said HRC spokesman David Smith. "While we welcome his spokeswoman's clarification that he has no problem with gay people, it's analogous to saying, 'I have no problem with Jewish people or black people, I just don't think they should be equal under the law.' "

Though it may be appropriate at this time to remove anti-sodomy laws from the books via the legislative process--we're ambivalent about the matter--Mr. Santorum is correct that the creation of a "right" to engage in such sexual acts opens the door to all manner of deviance. The Constitution is silent on the question of sexual behavior--such moral issues are rightly the province of localities--so the Court should be too.

One interesting sidelight though is the way libertarians insist that the Court declare these behaviors "rights" and intervene to protect them, thereby further ceding power to the State and taking it away from communities. So does the absolutism of liberty and tolerance tend toward statism and the destruction of all intervening institutions. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 22, 2003 10:54 AM