Associated(With Liberals)Press: "You could call week of April 20 Santorum Resignation Week at AP"

It was a perfectly absurd moment. Patrick Guerrierro, the new head of the gay-left Log Cabin Republicans, sat on a sedate Saturday morning C-SPAN set and declared it was a shame that Sen. Rick Santorum distracted us all from the Iraq war with his hurtful comments on homosexuality.

This was not just absurd because the Log Cabin Republicans did everything but throw balloons of blood at Santorum to get the story humming -- in alliance with the Human Rights Campaign and other gay-left intimidators. It was absurd because the biggest promoter of the Santorum story was the socially liberal Associated Press.

AP spent a week promoting this fraction of Santorum’s interview: "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."AP hyped this comparison by adding the word "gay" between "consensual" and "sex."

Santorum’s point was philosophical and legal: Do we want an absolutely unlimited right to privacy? That’s where we could be headed with the Texas sodomy case now before the Court.

The absurdity began as the interview was twisted beyond recognition. What better outlet for that than AP? Remember their track record. In the fall of 1998, AP made an obscure murder victim in Laramie, Wyoming a household name, turning the brutal killing of homosexual Matthew Shepard into grist for a countless series of editorials, books, plays, and TV "docudramas." A year later, AP shamelessly avoided national coverage of the murder of a 13-year-old Arkansas boy, Jesse Dirkhising. He died from suffocation after being bound, gagged with underwear in his mouth, blindfolded, taped to the bed, and sodomized by one gay man while another gay man watched. AP inspired no books, no plays, no movies on this largely anonymous young victim.

Now Santorum has run into the AP’s anti-"homophobe" buzzsaw. Supporters pointed out that the reporter who plucked the "intolerant" remarks out of an hour-long interview was Lara Jakes Jordan, the wife of Jim Jordan, who recently headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and now runs John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Isn’t that noteworthy? Journalists whined this was "blaming the messenger," and lamented cries of bias based on the mere whisper of marital associations.

But look at the story, and how this allegedly objective wire service promoted it like they were selling sunscreen at spring break. You could call the week of April 20 Santorum Resignation Week at AP.

1. The first story was "Family Values Drive Santorum’s Politics," a chance for Mrs. Jordan to explain how the senator’s beliefs are at odds with the Constitution. She summarized his view: "Homosexuality, feminism, liberalism all undermine the family. Even parts of the Constitution can harm the family." Note the utterly untrue liberal assumption that the Constitution presently insures the right to sodomy.

2. Unsurprisingly, the next day’s campaign led with "Gay Groups Urge GOP To Remove Santorum." Mrs. Jordan began by explaining the gay lobby was "fuming over Sen. Rick Santorum’s comparison of homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery."

3. On the third day, AP really pressed the accelerator on the story. "Santorum Seeks to Clarify Remarks on Gays," read the inaccurate headline. Santorum did not seek to clarify, saying: "I can’t deny that’s how I feel."

4. AP also reported "Dems Call for Santorum to Resign Post." This story didn’t have Mrs. Jordan’s byline – or anyone else’s – but it did have suspicious fingerprints, because the DSCC, Mr. Jordan’s old office, was leading the resignation parade. Several paragraphs later, Mr. Jordan’s new office kicked in. "Separately...John Kerry issued a statement."

5. AP also released a transcript of the gay-related section of the interview, so all of Washington could pick up on the story and presumably be horrified at Santorum’s traditionalism.

6. It got increasingly desperate on Day Four: "Dean Calls for Santorum to Resign Post." Far-left presidential candidate Howard Dean, Vermont’s guru of gay marriage, objected? How newsworthy.

7. Day Five was pure giggles: "Utah Sect Leader Criticizes Santorum." An 89-year-old polygamist from Utah was Pundit For A Day to keep the story going. This was news?

8. In case Howard Dean wasn’t earth-shattering enough, AP added "Chafee Chides Santorum for Gay Remarks." Liberal Lincoln, a Log Cabin Republican supporter, criticizing Santorum? Shocking.

9. Finally, on day six, one pro-Santorum headline: "Bush Praises Santorum As ‘Inclusive Man.’" Note this was the AP campaign’s first use of quotation marks in a headline.

10. On the seventh day, the story expired, with "Sen. Santorum Seen Likely Surviving Flap." That’s clearly not the outcome the AP’s Washington flap manufacturers wanted. But it died because no one outside AP and the radical left wanted to see Santorum get sacked.

Santorum's criticized argument involving bestiality, adultery, etc. was somewhat weak; other than incest, all of the cited crimes could be forbidden under other areas of state law (animal welfare, contract law, etc.). That being said, I would think the men in the original sodomy case (or their lawyer) might have been better served by a laches defense than a privacy defense.

Essentially, if a particular statute or ordinance is widely ignored by people and cops alike, and if it's widely known that it's widely ignored, the law becomes largely unenforceable except in cases where the conduct of the accused is in some way worse than that involved in most of the cases that were ignored.

For example, if the cops routinely fail to stop motorists who are going 62 in a 55mph zone, they cannot just out of the blue arrest someone going 55.1 but they could arrest someone going 90.

Unless Texas is a very unusual state, there are almost certainly gay bars from which people go to hotel rooms to engage in sodomy. Such bars are no secret, and if the police had any particular interest in catching people engaged in sodomy, it would be easy for them to do so.

I suspect, however, that cops are aware of gay bars and don't particularly bother them. If this is the case, the fact that these two people were caught and arrested is not capricious but nonetheless arbitrary. Justice is not well-served by punishing a random 1 in 1,000,000 violations of a particular crime.

Santorum is right
Joseph Farah's Between The Lines
Posted: April 28, 2003

There are some people in this country who want to fire Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., because he talked candidly, dispassionately and accurately about a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

I always thought that's what senators did for a living.

But I think someone should lose their job over this national story.

As a news professional, I suggest the reporter who interviewed him and wrote the story is the one who should be fired from her position as an Associated Press newswoman.

There's only one reason Santorum is getting flack for his remarks – they were dead-on target and undermine the entire homosexual political agenda. Santorum articulated far better and more courageously than any elected official how striking down laws against sodomy will lead inevitably to striking down laws against incest, bigamy and polygamy. You just can't say consenting adults have an absolute right to do what they want sexually without opening that Pandora's box.

I've drawn this analogy before – in columns and in my new book, "Taking America Back."

Santorum also made a distinction between homosexuality and homosexual acts – clearly differentiating between the sinner and the sin – a traditional and mainstream Judeo-Christian perspective.

So how did this tempest in a teapot become a national scandal, with some of his colleagues even calling for him to step down?

It was a set-up. It was what we call in the news business a "hatchet job." Rick Santorum is a young, good-looking, articulate conservative in the Senate's Republican leadership. He was deliberately targeted by a political activist disguised as a reporter – Lara Jakes Jordan.

I invite you to read her original story and see for yourself how it is dripping in venom. It's an editorial camouflaged as a news story. And she wrote it for the largest and most powerful news-gathering operation in the world, ensuring it would get maximum play in newspapers throughout the world.

Who is Lara Jakes Jordan?

For starters, she is married to veteran Democratic Party operative Jim Jordan, the former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and manager of Sen. John Kerry's presidential bid.

Not surprisingly, the Massachusetts Democrat was among the first to criticize Santorum's remarks, using it as an opportunity to attack the White House. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Kerry got an advance copy of the article given his connections.

But there's more to the Lara Jakes Jordan story.

In January of this year, Mrs. Jordan was one of the signatories on a letter to her bosses at the AP attacking the news organization for "rolling back diversity" by not extending benefits to domestic partners.

In a symbolic move, the signatories to the letter returned key chains AP management gave them to "celebrate" its corporate diversity. The key chains carried the slogan: "AP Diversity: Many Views, One Vision.

It seems Mrs. Jordan's ideological fervor is not reserved only for her private life and her corporate politicking. This woman clearly ambushed Santorum on an issue near and dear to her bleeding heart.

I've been in the daily news business for 25 years. When I got started a quarter century ago, there was an old newsroom saying that went like this: "I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus."

Mrs. Jordan violated that old newsroom ethic. She abdicated her right to cover the circus because she was sleeping with an elephant – or, in this case, a donkey.

That's why I say these catcalls for the head of Rick Santorum are nothing more than a political sideshow. It's not Rick Santorum who should be forced from office for clearly stating views that have been considered mainstream for the last 5,000 years. It's Lara Jakes Jordan who should be drummed out of the news profession for scoring cheap political points under the guise of news reporting.

It's not Rick Santorum who should apologize to anyone. It's the Associated Press for sponsoring this political hit piece.

It's Lara Jakes Jordan who should be drummed out of the news profession for scoring cheap political points under the guise of news reporting.

Maybe, but as Brent Bozell points out in his article, this was an institutional hit. Ms. Jordan was certainly a player in what went on, but this was a planned and orchestrated campaign that went far beyond her. It's not even clear the she instigated it.

We just watched the largest news reporting organization in the world fabricate a story about a political figure. They rammed that story into the public discourse with numerous follow-ups of their own making, and even lied about the content of their own fabricated story in the follow-ups. And all of this was clearly done as a partisan political hit job on behalf of the Democratic Party.

This wasn't "media bias." This wasn't shaving the truth. This was sending a Democratic political operative to do a "profile interview" on a prominent Republican Senator. "Media bias" is when they chop the interview up and release things that sound nasty when taken out of context. That did that here, but first they changed the text. They put words in the Senator's mouth that he did not say. Then they trumpeted this falsified "interview" from sea to shining sea.

This was beyond dishonest. It was political advocacy — and lying political advocacy at that — under color of reporting news.

If there are any honest people on the board at AP, they would track down who did this, who planned it, who authorized it, and fire the lot of them before they can ever do anything like this again.

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