Posted on 05/19/2003 12:04:07 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
On April 23, central Pennsylvania TV news stations were buzzing with indignation about an interview that the state's junior senator, Republican Rick Santorum, recently had given to the Associated Press. News commentators announced that the National Gay and Lesbian Alliance and Vermont governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, a leading advocate of gay rights, had called for Santorum to resign from the Senate because of insensitive remarks. Santorum had let it be known that he had a "problem with homosexual acts." He also criticized the Supreme Court for taking away the power of the states to enforce traditional family morals, referring negatively to the Griswold v. Connecticut case in 1965, which had struck down a Connecticut statute banning the sale of contraceptives.
His most horrifying observations were these: "And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [homosexual] sex in your home, you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery." Furthermore: "Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: Society is based on the future of that society."
The enraged leftist media went on to announce that Santorum's career deservedly was over. (In view of his base, these remarks will not hurt him any more than Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would be hurt among his voters by his call for more protection of a right to a third-term abortion.) Meanwhile, "conservative" commentators accused Santorum of "just not getting it." Thus John Podhoretz dressed him down on April 25 in the New York Post for being "a bull in a china shop, offering examples of such surpassing vulgarity they almost seemed designed to delegitimize his views." According to Podhoretz, "Our nation's culture died an unmourned death on 9/11, when it was clear that whatever differences we Americans had with each other on matters of lifestyle were nothing compared to the murderous hunger of our terrorist adversaries who would happily kill all of us no matter what we did in the bedroom."
Allow me to explain why Santorum is addressing a national issue that all the invocations of 9/11 do not render less timely. First, it seems to me bizarre that Podhoretz objects to "examples of surpassing vulgarity" that Santorum mentioned only in passing. Why, for example, should we consider bigamy and polygamy, which Podhoretz as a Jew must know are fully sanctioned in the Old Testament and routinely were practiced by our Semitic ancestors, more shocking than sodomy? The conjugal patterns established by the Hebrew patriarchs should be less upsetting to us than what is being sanctioned by Gov. Dean.
Moreover, Santorum raised a constitutional problem that the late Justice Byron White (to whom he respectfully refers) and Judge Robert Bork have explored with great anguish. Since the 1960s the Supreme Court has been on a rip, overturning local and state laws that uphold traditional moral and religious beliefs. Whether legislating abortion rights for all 50 states or requiring the removal of Christian symbols from public institutions and public squares, judicial social engineering is alive and well. As the highest court is about to reconsider the constitutionality of the antisodomy laws in Georgia (which it narrowly sustained in a previous decision), Santorum is thinking aloud about how far our judges might go to defend as a "right to privacy" the flouting of traditional social morals.
For all his appeals to "us right-wingers," it is not Podhoretz but Santorum who understands conservative priorities. While, like Podhoretz, Santorum has backed the war against terrorism, he is not trying to recast the right as an antiterrorist crusade. He believes that the well-being of our society hinges on cultural and moral unity at home. Multiculturalism and coercive tolerance of bizarre lifestyles describes a social experiment, not a civilization. Santorum is looking to "the future," which is the dimension of time that should interest conservatives. Given this perspective, he has no patience with short-term Republicans, who run around appeasing the practitioners of alternative social moralities.
Nor has he made his cultural decision because it "exists in his religion [Catholicism]." Santorum has embraced his moral standard because he believes it is necessary for the future of our civilization. Not only Catholics but "every society in history" has defined marriage "as a bond between a man and a woman." If that is not the case, then the "West" and the United States as part of it, will continue to be reconfigured. Dean already is doing that for us, whether we like it or not, building a multicultural laboratory on the basis of his doctrine of an ever-expanding tolerance.
It’s a concept Liberaltarians can’t completely understand while living in their vacuum. Santorum and Justice White are right on the money, when comparing any sexual behavior outside the context of a normal man/woman relationship then it’s open to ALL “sexual” behaviors. It’s called moral relativism, who are you to say ones animal relationship in the privacy of ones own barn is any less valid than others just because you find it repulsive?
This stuff has gotten to the point of the ridiculous. The "diversity police", who decide which stories merit coverage and thereby insuring the left-wing bias of the majority of the print media in this country seem to have beaten this dead horse for all it's worth. Today, the LA Times had an article about some students at some university who had walked out on Santoram, who was speaking there as well as receiving an honorary degree, for comments "linking homosexuality" with those other previously mention perversions, though I believe the author included pedophilia as well. I guess it was just a slow news day!
They were enforced once, enough to produce the case that is now in the Supreme Court.
Big city police departments in Texas DO NOT enforce sodomy laws in homes.
That's because Liberaltarians are hypocrites...
The quote in question has the word "homosexual" in brackets. As the person who pointed this out said, I don't know anyone who speaks in brackets. So did he use that word, or was it inserted by the reporter for the story?
I think it's important to get an answer to that question for many reasons. Besides at least making the parameters of this debate more clear, if it is true that such an important word were simply inserted into his text, then it highlights just how much of a role the mainstream media plays in framing the news to their desire.
I am shocked at the number of freepers who seem confused by the use of brackets. They are extremely common in reporting. The brackets indicate that the words contained within them are NOT a part of the quote, but they clarify or condense the quote to give you its' full meaning.
"So did he use that word, or was it inserted by the reporter for the story?"
He did NOT use the word, but taken in context the reporters' use of brackets to insert "homosexual" was appropriate. They were discussing the Texas case.
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