Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Not only does Rick Santorum equate homosexuality between consenting adults with incest, not only does he (as Atrios and Kos point out) essentially call sex between priests and teens "consensual" (as a bizarre, backhanded way of attacking liberals), he also says that if he had his druthers it'd be okey-dokey if every state in the union voted to make birth control illegal:

SANTORUM: ...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. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. 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....

AP: ...Would a President Santorum eliminate a right to privacy — you don't agree with it?

SANTORUM: I've been very clear about that. The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don't agree with that. So I would make the argument that with President, or Senator or Congressman or whoever Santorum, I would put it back to where it is, the democratic process. If New York doesn't want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn't agree with it, but that's their right. But I don't agree with the Supreme Court coming in.


The Griswold case is like the outcome of the Civil War, or the outcome of the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996 -- something conservatives just can't accept. Robert Bork attacked it, and that's why he was rejected by a Senate in which a few Democrats still had spines.

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