Dispatches: Bigotry, Intolerance in U.S. Senate

DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: Senator Santorum does not stand for the virtues and freedoms of the country he represents.

By: Hank Kalet
   Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania is the third-highest ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate.
   Therefore, what he says, by virtue of his position, should be seen as an extension the beliefs of the national Republican Party.
   So it is troubling that someone with as much power as he has is willing to say something so crass and offensive as the comments he apparently made to the Associated Press in a recent interview.
   During the interview, Sen. Santorum likened homosexuality to, among other things, bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery and he criticized the right to privacy for allowing people to do things "that are deviant within their own home."
   He then went on to bemoan the "right to privacy lifestyle" because under it "the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions."
   This is pretty strong stuff, yet there hasn’t been the kind of political firestorm that ultimately swallowed Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott in December after he essentially endorsed, 55 years after the fact, a presidential candidacy whose main plank was the defense of segregation.
   Sen. Lott’s remarks came at the 100th birthday party for Strom Thurmond and ultimately forced him to remove himself from consideration as Senate majority leader. He told the assembled that Mississippi was right to back the segregationist ticket in 1948, "And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either."
   After initially attempting to sweep the comments under the rug, the national Republican leadership cut Sen. Lott loose and the senator spent the better part of a month doing penance, including making a rather smarmy and disingenuous apology on BET, the Black Entertainment Television network.
   Sen. Santorum has been given a lot more slack by his party. While some, like Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, offered harsh rebukes, the majority of Republicans either came to Sen. Santorum’s defense or stayed silent.
   Both Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and President George W. Bush praised the Pennsylvania senator. The president, through spokesman Ari Fleischer, called him an "inclusive man" (whatever that might be), while Sen. Frist said Sen. Santorum "is a consistent voice for inclusion and compassion in the Republican Party and in the Senate, and to suggest otherwise is just politics."
   Is it? While Sen. Santorum was very clear to say he had "no problem with homosexuality," he followed that up by saying that "homosexual acts" — along with bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery and other acts — "undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family" and "are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family."
   So, in Sen. Santorum’s worldview, one can be a homosexual, but not act like a homosexual — not what I would call an inclusive approach to the issue.
   For the senator, this is a question of policy, a question of whether there exists an individual right to privacy and whether the government has a legitimate right to regulate individual behavior — including consensual sexual behavior and the right to an abortion. The right to privacy, he says, does not exist in the Constitution. It was incorrectly created by the Supreme Court when it ruled against the state of Connecticut, striking down criminal penalties for the use of contraceptives, and then later when it upheld a women’s right to an abortion, he says.
   "And now we’re just extending it out," he said. "And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it’s my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that’s antithetical to strong, healthy families. Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, where it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family."
   This analysis of homosexuality and privacy smacks of the kind of government control of our private lives that we have witnessed in theocratic states like Afghanistan under the Taliban. There is no mention of the family unit in the Constitution, but there is a long body of law endorsing the right to privacy — the court in 1965, in creating an explicit right, cited the shadows cast by "specific guarantees" in earlier case law and in the Fourth and, in particular, Ninth amendments.
   This is not about policy, but about individual freedom. And Sen. Santorum’s remarks should be seen as the bigoted comments they were. They were no different than Sen. Lott recollections of the good old days of segregation and should be met with the same kind of censure.
   Instead, we have President George W. Bush and Sen. Frist and others coming to his defense, all the while hoping this thing will go away.
   What do I hope? That Sen. Santorum comes to be seen as representative of the leadership of his party and that people see his and his colleagues’ fundamentalist approach to privacy and sex as dangerous for our democracy and our freedoms.
   And I hope, as Joan Walsh put it on Salon.com, the senator’s "candor wakes more Americans up to the fact that Iraqis aren’t the only ones at risk of losing their freedom to religious fundamentalism."
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and the Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]