Too close to home

Sen. Rick Santorum (Penn.), third-ranking Republican in the Senate, has committed this month's Republican gaffe:

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] 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," Santorum said, according to the AP.

Santorum spokeswoman Erica Clayton Wright said the quote was accurate "only in the context related specifically to the right to privacy in the Supreme Court case." The senator, she said, "has no problem with gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender individuals." Washington Post story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7390-2003Apr21.html

Can I just say a few things about that?

The implied right to privacy, which was established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, does indeed pertain to the privacy that people can assume "in the bedroom" or around sexual topics -- especially in married couples, a distinction that forms part of the state's case in the Texas case that's currently being decided in the Supreme Court. In the arguments in that case, lawyers and justices haggled over whether there was a difference between a married heterosexual couple having anal sex, and a gay (presumably unmarried) couple doing the same. Apparently it's all right for married straight people to buttfuck, even to Republicans.

But the senator is way off base in saying that if the justices decide for the queers it means "you" (presumably he meant straight married people, since in the Republican world that's the standard) "have the right to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery."

Let me draw a few distinctions here. For one thing, the arguments in the Lawrence case made clear that both the justices and the lawyers on both sides wished the court to decide narrowly on the issue, and not on bigamy, incest and the rest. Second, the arguments themselves addressed specific issues of why the issue of consenting homosexuality was different from those other issues. And third, that fucking Republican is just trying to make the same tired Anita Bryant argument that opening the door to homosexuality will lead inevitably to the downfall of society. How do I know that? Because unless he knows even less about constitutional law than I do, he can't possibly believe what he's saying. Therefore he's just making a political, rhetorical point -- and isn't there enough of that shit going around these days?

Then there's that last bit: The senator, she said, "has no problem with gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender individuals." Oh really? I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet there is at least one, and probably more, gay person on his staff. And I'll bet some of his relatives are queer too. It always seems to work out that way, anyway.