Just four months after Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) was forced to resign over racist remarks as Senate majority leader, Republican Senate conference chair Rick Santorum (R-PA) is under fire after the Associated Press published his anti-gay comments, likening consensual gay sex with bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery. Discussing the Texas sodomy case currently pending in the Supreme Court, Santorum told the AP, “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 continued, “All of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family… It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution,” reported PlanetOut.com.
Gay rights advocates, including the Human Rights Campaign, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, the Pennsylvania Log Cabin Republications, OutFront, and the Pennsylvania Gender Rights Coalition are demanding that Senate Republicans remove Santorum from his leadership post-the third highest party seat.
Santorum’s statement that the constitutional “right to privacy” doesn’t exist implies that Roe v. Wade, which is based on the right to privacy, was wrongly decided by the US Supreme Court. Last month, the Senate passed the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 (S.3), sponsored by Santorum, to impose fines and prison sentences on physicians for performing certain abortion procedures. The legislation excludes a health exception for the pregnant woman and the vague language threatens to stop doctors from performing various types of abortions, including safe early term procedures. Furthermore, “partial-birth” is not a legitimate medical term, but an inflammatory phrase intended to give a distorted picture of the procedure.
