Rick Santorum really does not like the political activism that gay people have launched against him, ever since his 2003 remarks comparing the legalization of gay sex and gay marriage to pedophilia, bestiality and incest.
“So the gay community said, ‘He’s comparing gay sex to incest and polygamy, how dare he do this,’ and they have gone out on a, I would argue, jihad against Rick Santorum since then,” Santorum said at a campaign event in Spartanburg, S.C., on Friday, The Hill reports.
There is a certain irony here, in that radical Islamists — like Santorum himself — would want to see homosexuality outlawed. And it is Santorum’s prior remarks on that subject that have led to the situation that he is complaining about.
In a famous interview with the Associated Press in April 2003, Santorum discussed the then-pending Supreme Court case of Lawrence v. Texas, in which the court was widely expected to (and ultimately did) overturn existing state laws against sodomy.
“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing,” Santorum said.
He also strongly stated his support for laws against gay sex, and warned against the dangers of overturning them:
We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And 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 anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.
This event served as the major motivation for the online campaign by sex-columnist Dan Savage, who is gay, to create a new word, “santorum,” to be given a prurient definition by submissions and a final poll among his readers.
We will not print out exactly what “santorum” is on this site, but a reader can find it very easily through a Google search, with it actually being the top hit when searching for his surname, and currently being second only to his campaign site when searching for his full name — a fact that has continued to haunt Rick Santorum.
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Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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