Memphis Lesbian/Gay Spokesman Assails Senator Santorum and GOP

Recent comments by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) on homosexuality and the right to privacy raised a few eyebrows in the media and drew condemnation from advocates for gay and lesbian civil rights.

Some Democratic presidential candidates criticized Santorum's statements, made in an April 7 interview with The Associated Press, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said he should give up his No. 3 post in the Republican party leadership. But the White House says our "compassionate conservative" president believes Santorum is doing a good job and is "an inclusive man." Senate Majority Lead er Bill Frist says he will remain in the party's leadership.

(Guest columnist Jim Maynard is co-chairman of the Memphis Lesbian & Gay Coalition for Justice. Commenting on a pending case before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Texas sodomy law is being challenged for unfairly targeting gay and lesbian couples, Santorum told The AP that the right to privacy does not exist in the Constitution and that homosexual acts threaten the American family.)

In a bizarre statement, Santorum said he has "no problem with homosexuality - I have a problem with homosexual acts."

He appears willing to accept that some people have a homosexual orientation, but not to allow them to act on it, an attitude that recalls the "don't ask, don't tell" mentality. Conservatives such as Santorum want to appear to accept gay people as human beings, but they don't want gays to act on their feelings and desires or be treated equally.

In The AP interview, Santorum argued that "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 any thing."

He also linked the right to privacy to "moral relativism," and referred to sexual relationships between Catholic priests and young men as an example of a "basic homosexual relationship."

In suggesting that gay and lesbian relationships threaten the family, Santorum ignored research that indicates that one-half to three-quarters of lesbians and gay men are in committed, long-term relationships. Information from the 2000 Census shows that one-third of lesbian couples and 22 percent of gay male couples are raising children.

Santorum's remarks about privacy should have elicited strong repudiation from Republicans, who are supposed to favor limited government control over individual rights. Evidently, however, the GOP is more concerned about government interference in regulating big business than with its intrusion into the bedrooms of consenting adults.

The issues that are at stake in the Lawrence vs. Texas case before the Supreme Court do not affect only gay and lesbian people.

If there is no right to privacy, if the government can regulate the private sexual conduct of consenting adults, then might it not also restrict other freedoms such as reproductive rights and birth control?

When candidate George W. Bush was asked about the civil rights of gays and lesbians, he said someone's sexual orientation was none of his business.

As president, Bush has nominated several Cabinet members and judges who seem to support Santorum's view of gay people and homosexuality. Bush's nominee for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Alabama Atty. Gen. Bill Pryor, has submitted a Supreme Court brief that supports the Texas sodomy law by using the same arguments as Santorum. Pryor's brief contends homosexual acts are "historically recognized as a wrong," and are not protected by the Constitution.

Many GOP moderates are trying to make the Republican Party more open to gays and lesbians, and a growing number of gay Republicans would like to have a party and candidates they can support.

According to an exit poll analysis by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, 5 percent of voters identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, and one in three of those supported Republican candidates in recent national elections.

President Bush and the Republican Party - including Santorum and the rest of its leadership - must decide if they truly want to be the "inclusive" party of Lincoln and limited government, or the party of Jerry Falwell and the theocratic Christian right.

Many GOP moderates are trying to make the Republican Party more open to gays and lesbians, and a growing number of gay Republicans would like to have a party and candidates they can support.

Log Cabin GOP Leader Still on 'us_Queers' Forum [which advocates murdering Christian leaders]

Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 US 186 (1986) The Constitution does not confer a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy.

BURGER, C.J., Concurring Opinion Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards. Homosexual sodomy was a capital crime under Roman law.... During the English Reformation, when powers of the ecclesiastical courts were transferred to the King's Courts, the first English statute criminalizing sodomy was passed.... Blackstone described "the infamous crime against nature" as an offense of "deeper malignity" than rape, a heinous act "the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature," and "a crime not fit to be named." W. Blackstone, Commentaries . The common law of England, including its prohibition of sodomy, became the received law of Georgia and the other Colonies. In 1816, the Georgia Legislature passed the statute at issue here, and that statute has been continuously in force in one form or another since that time. To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.

Thomas Jefferson on Sodomy Sect. XIV. Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy* with a man or woman, shall be punished; if a man, by castration, a woman, by boring through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch in diameter at the least. Peterson, Merrill D. "Crimes and Punishments" Thomas Jefferson: Writings Public Papers (Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1984) pp. 355, 356.

Hundreds rally for '10 Commandments judge' Moore wrote a separate concurring opinion, repudiating homosexuality on religious grounds, calling it "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God."

SODOMY : Santorum Crisis Exposes Republican Weakness

White House backs Santorum; he's 'inclusive' & other Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, have affirmed their support for Santorum.

Republicans Confident Gay Rights Issue Will Hurt DeanRichard White (search), a Republican state senator from Mississippi, said any candidate talking about gay rights might as well not even visit his state.

"The people down here, they are not going to put up with that kind of stuff," White said. "We're not prepared for all that in Mississippi or anywhere else in the southern states."

Support Sen. Santorum's strong stand for family (PETITION) 26,805 Signatures

I don't recall reading that Judge Moore capitulated to the federal judge.

Moore team files briefs in case on Commandments

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled on Nov. 18 that Moore's 5,280-pound granite monument is an unconstitutional state establishment of religion. Thompson's ruling, as well as his orders to Moore to remove the monument, are on appeal the 11th Circuit Court.

Congress, the Court, and the Constitution

1. Congress assumed that the Court is properly the enforcer of the First Amendment.

This is by now a very old error, and one so venerable that to speak in correction of it is to raise questions about one's sanity in most circles. So deep runs the popular myth that the Supreme Court is properly the final authority in enforcing virtually every provision of the Constitution that a digression is necessary here into the more general question of judicial review. As Professor Robert Clinton has shown, the judicial power to invalidate the actions of other branches of the national government was widely understood at the founding to be ''departmental'' or ''coordinate''—a power he calls ''functional review'' enabling the judiciary to pronounce authoritatively on the constitutionality of laws touching on the integrity of the courts' own functions, for instance where a case concerns jurisdictional issues, standards of evidence, or the provision of simple due process. This limited version of judicial review was all that was either exercised or claimed for the Court by John Marshall in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison.(see footnote 131) On the other hand, the legislative and executive branches have a like authority to have the ''last word'' on those constitutional questions bearing on the exercise of their own powers, arising from the provisions of the Constitution addressed to themselves. Thus, that same John Marshall, for instance, held that the reach of Congress's power over commerce among the states was to be controlled authoritatively not by the judiciary, but by the people through democratic processes: such are ''the restraints on which the people must often rely solely, in all representative governments.''(see footnote 132)

Now obviously, the terms of the First Amendment address themselves to the Congress and not to the judiciary, and in no way would an infringement of one of the rights therein have an adverse effect on the proper functioning of judicial processes. Moreover, if the First Amendment had been expected to be the subject of routine judicial enforcement, we would expect the subject to have come up frequently in the First Congress that debated and drafted the Bill of Rights. Yet, in his brilliant account of how the Bill of Rights came to be added to the Constitution, Professor Robert Goldwin manages to tell the whole story in complete detail without ever once mentioning that the subject of judicial enforcement of the Bill arose at all. The point of the Bill of Rights was not to trigger judicial review, but to weave a love of liberty into the American political culture. Here ''is how it works,'' Goldwin tells us in his recent book:

[T]o the extent that these principles of free government [in the Bill of Rights] have become a part of our ''national sentiment,'' they do, indeed, often enable us, the majority, to restrain ourselves, the majority, from oppressive actions. That is the import of the first five words of the Bill of Rights: ''Congress shall make no law'' that attempts to accomplish certain prohibited things. It means that even if a majority in Congress, representing a majority of us, the people, wants to make a law that the Constitution forbids it to make, we, all of us, superior to any majority, say it must not be done, because the Constitution is the will of all of us, not just a majority of us.(see footnote 133)

So as not to be misunderstood, I should add that certain provisions in the Bill of Rights do address themselves to the courts, and so are fit subjects for judicial review—obviously amendments five through seven, arguably four through eight—but the First Amendment is not one of them. It is only in this century, with the expansion of judicial authority in every direction, that we have come to think otherwise.

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