It is a rhetorical technique which inevitably will fail in an open enviroment because all it does is leave the audience feeling like he has insulted their intelligence.
“This is not hyperbole, this is reductio ad absurdum.”
Marriage between a man and a woman is necessary for the responsible care and upbringing of children, and hence the survival of any serious culture. Homosexual marriage and communal humping should not be treated as being the equivalent of traditional marriage.
When Santorum complains about our leftist elites trying to trivialize marriage, he is not being “whiney”. The left is trying to trivialize marriage for the same reason that they are dumbing down public schools. They want to deconstruct our culture.