Senator Rick "Spreading" Santorum (R-17th Century) hit the airwaves yesterday in his tireless crusade to shirk his Senate duties and promote his book about how much he loves kids.
That is, unless you're a gay kid.
Appearing on Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio show, the Senator got practically frothy when the discussion turned to gay marriage and gay rights. [HT: C&L.]
Listen to the MP3 here. A (long) transcript of the good parts, and a righteous fisking, follow after the jump ...
[Picking up about 20 minutes in]:
BRIAN LEHRER (WNYC): So the gay rights groups, for example, would say, “Well, um, if we want to marry each other, um, that doesn’t have anything to do with you.” Why would you argue that it does?
SANTORUM: Well, uh –
LEHRER: How does it affect you?
SANTORUM: Yeah, I – it affects me because it redefines the definition of marriage and therefore affects my marriage. Because my marriage is defined by how society defines marriage. And if marriage is defined, as it would be in the case of changing the definition of marriage to include a broader circle of people other than one man, one woman, in that, in a marriage relationship, if it changes that definition, then marriage becomes something different than what it is today. See, marriage and the purpose of marriage that every culture and every civilization known to man has had – not just religious ones, but those that were animists – had in fact a religious, I mean, a – excuse me, a ceremony or ritual in which one man and one woman would be held out as something unique and very important to the civilization. Why? Because the point of marriage from a societal point of view is not to affirm the love of two people and make people feel good about who they are in their relationship. But in fact the point of marriage is for having children and raising that children [sic] in the best environment possible.
LEHRER: But that’s –
SANTORUM: The most secure environment possible. And where one man and one woman bring unique gifts to the marriage, because men and women are different, they bring unique gifts to the marriage to be able to raise that child in the optimal place.
LEHRER: But it –
SANTORUM: If we change that, we devalue the institution, and we change it and reorient it more toward parents and away from children.
Soooo much bullshit, so little bandwidth. Santorum is deluding himself and others by clinging to this notion that "every culture," from the religious to the "animist," has defined marriage based on "one-man, one-woman." You need look no further than the Bible (ever read it, Rick?) to see that this is crap.
In fact, there was a healthy debate in society at large as recently as the Sixth Century about polygamy. It fact, taking multiple wives was viewed as necessary. No less an authority than St. Augustine debunks Santorum's nonsense:
Polygamy, he writes, "was lawful among the ancient fathers: whether it be lawful now also, I would not hastily pronounce. For there is not now necessity of begetting children, as there then was, when, even when wives bear children, it was allowed, in order to a more numerous posterity, to marry other wives in addition, which now is certainly not lawful."
(Emphasis mine.) And if "one-man, one-woman" is so inherent in every culture in history, what about Muslims? What about Mormons? Santorum has conveniently forgotten them.
Santorum has still not coherently articulated how the marriage of another discrete couple affects his own marriage personally. Does it cause him to become divorced? Will it alter the amount of alimony he would pay in the event that he became divorced? Does it alter his joint-filing status for tax purposes? Gay marriage merely opens an institution to couples for whom it was previously denied. Spinning an answer with bogus history is a rather thin veil for bigotry.
Santorum also refuses to contemplate the potential benefits of gay marriage – the conservative argument for marriage. Efforts to constantly marginalize and stigmatize will lead to more loveless male-female marriages entered into by gays, and the largely inevitably infidelity, the bringing of STDs into the home, and divorce.
I await Santorum's views on how such a broken home qualifies as an "optimal place" for children simply because it was established as one-man, one-woman in such square-peg, round-hole fashion.
And who says marriage isn't about allowing two people to affirm their love for each other, rather than being primarily about having kids? If he is so concerned about that, why have such a cow about a few thousand gay couples, rather than the straight couples who want to marry but are unable or unwilling to procreate? (Lehrer gets to this point next.)
[…]
LEHRER: So all the heterosexual married couples choosing not to have kids today, more than ever before, you would say what to them?
SANTORUM: It’s the exception rather than the rule, and what society should be focused on is, is the rule and the ideal. And the ideal for, again, what, we want – what I see, I believe one of the great reasons for laws, and, is to make sure that society continues, and continues in a healthy way. That means we need to set up institutions where we try to strive for the ideal, not necessarily making – making, make, uh, requiring everyone to achieve that ideal. But we should have the ideal in place to give children the best chance for a healthy life.
If by "exception" you mean 55 percent, then maybe you've got a case, because that is the percentage of married couples without children under 18. (Granted, that is undoubtedly because that figure also includes parents with older children, but the percentage of couples who never have children also appears to be rising precipitously.)
Moreover, whose "rule" and "ideal" are we talking about? Is it the "historical" ideal that Rick just spent four minutes lying about?
And how is Santorum going to achieve this "ideal" when monumental societal and cultural forces are working against him, such as the huge number of women who continue to enter the workforce? Apparently the way he has chosen to shove this massive genie back into the bottle is by focusing his wrath on the microscopically small number of gay couples who want to marry.
Nice. That's quite a star to hitch your wagon to.
Besides, gay people can procreate and raise children. They just can't procreate with each other. In the same vein, should it be legal for a re-married spouse in a heterosexual marriage to raise a child who is not biologically theirs from the previous marriage?
Oh, sorry, we're talking about ideals. (I prefer to call them "fantasies," because the number of families that meet the "ideal" that Rick is promoting in his book is approximately three – and somehow I doubt Rick's is one of them.)
LEHRER: It came out this month that your communications director, Robert Traynham, is gay. How long did you know that?
SANTORUM: Uh, I’ve known it for a while.
LEHRER: And if he has a boyfriend, is that the moral equivalent as, in a famous quote of yours, of bigamy, adultery, or incest or even bestiality?
SANTORUM: Well, I didn’t – number one, my famous quote did not draw moral equivalence. And in fact if you read the quote in its proper context without words inserted by a reporter, uh, who put words in my mouth that I did not say, nor did I mean –
LEHRER: Can I read the quote and you tell me how accurate this version of it is, from the AP?
SANTORUM: Please do. Go ahead.
LEHRER: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home --” And there the reporter inserted the word “gay” in parentheses.
SANTORUM: Right, which I did not say.
LEHRER: OK.
Lehrer is reading from the initial AP story, rather than the full transcript, which is no less damning. The reporter added the word "gay" because that was clearly the context of the conversation. To charge that a reporter is "putting words in your mouth" because they added one word for the sake of clarity is disingenuous and ridiculous. The Senator's attempts to discredit the entirety of the story by making such a broad charge of invented quotes doesn't stand up under scrutiny.
SANTORUM: And let me explain before you go on.
LEHRER: So – OK.
SANTORUM: What the court was saying is that if you have the right to consensual sexual activities, then what I, and basically what I was doing there is quoting the Bowers decision, and Justice White’s opinion in the Bowers decision, which was the previous case to the Lawrence case, and basically what Justice White said is that we can’t grant consensual sexual activity to one form of sex activity and somehow draw an artificial line against other forms of sexual activity. That’s what I said, that’s what the quote was, was, was centered around. It was a legal argument where I simply was repeating what Justice White had said in the Supreme Court case 12, 12 or 13 years prior. And I might add it’s almost exactly what Justice Scalia said in the dissent in the, in the Lawrence v Texas case.
LEHRER: This is in the sodomy case. If the – so the full quote, your actual quote without any words inserted: “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.”
SANTORUM: Right.
LEHRER: And the gay rights groups would say, “No, because all of those other things have victims. And so the consensual sex that is gay sex is just not in the same category as incest or adultery or bigamy.”
SANTORUM: I, I mean, I respect their argument. I disagree with it. And I think when you say that consensual sexual activity, you have a much harder time – and by the way, Justice Scalia feels this way, Justice White felt this way and other courts along the line who, who were, whether they were the circuit courts and other courts that were dealing with this case, basically said virtually the same things I say: that once you open up that window beyond, you know, what originally was, to be honest with you, what was originally sex with inside marriage [?], once you open that door, and it, now instead of, that the Supreme Court was protecting sexual activities within marriage, once you sort of leave, take marriage away and say it’s now just consent, you open up a door that I think is going to be very hard to close to other activities. And in fact, you see polygamists who are now filing suit in a variety of courts across the country asking for the same rights, uh, that the Bowers – excuse me, that the Lawrence decision has given to same-sex couples.
If you have not yet read the famous interview that spawned these quotes in its entirety, I beg you, please do so. [LINK]
It is an absolute lie to argue that the "context" of what he had said was the Bowers case. The context was Lawrence, upon which the court was preparing to rule at the time Santorum gave the AP interview. He admits as much in the interview if you look at the words preceding the "famous" quote:
"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."
Further, Justice White's words did not remotely contemplate Santorum's feared "man-on-dog" liaisons (from the same interview). That Santorum's mind automatically wanders to such things is further confirmation of how he views ordinary gay Americans.
LEHRER: By the way, do you have lively debates with your press secretary over this? Does he try to convince you, do you try to convince him to go get cured?
SANTORUM: Uh, no, I – look, his personal life is his personal life. I don’t have lively debates with any of my staff about their personal lives. It’s their personal life, and I have lively debates about issues of, that, of public policy. And I have people on my staff that agree with me on everything and – well, not everything, but most everything – and I have those who don’t. And uh, you know, that makes for a healthy debate in the office.
Yes, I'm sure there is healthy, open debate in the Santorum office, because clearly he realizes how moronic his arguments are, right?
Look, if there were another word for "disingenuous," I would use it, but there isn't. In the same AP interview linked to above, Santorum says: "I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts."
Clearly, he cannot expect that all homosexuals be celibate, while he and his straightie pals get to partake in the joys of sex. That in itself smacks of its own nasty brand of elitism and exceptionalism. So the distinction is a false one. (It is also the distinction the Catholic Church makes, which should not exactly be the authority on American law.)
So Santorum admits he has a problem with heterosexual acts, and this is what he is basing his legislative agenda upon. So it simply doesn't follow to argue that these policies have nothing to do with "private lives." The Bowers and Lawrence cases were about nothing if not the right to privacy.
The dissenting words of Justice Blackmun in the Bowers case nearly 20 years ago would seem to apply to Senator Santorum even today: "the ... almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity is particularly hard to justify."
Indeed, the logical circles that Santorum is running in are so incoherent, so twisted, that his desperate desire to "preserve" his own marriage ring hollow.
Mal, the whole problem with your argument is this.....every bit of it is devoted to saying that the one-man, one-woman marriage is not the best relationship for raising kids, all else being equal.
You can't and you won't win that one. I won't even back you in that regard.
Santorum is right when he says that the point of marriage from a social standpoint is procreation and raising said kids. The question is whether or not our laws, which is the main issue here, should be structured to solely benefit that idea.
He says yes, I say yes, with qualifications. In my opinion, if procreation is the highest purpose of marriage, then non-procreative marriages should not enjoy the same benefits as procreative do, regardless of whether it is heterosexual or homosexual. However, when the relationship becomes procreative, then it achieves that highest level of benefits, with the additional ones being those which facilitate the raising of children.
Posted by: North Dallas Thirty | August 08, 2005 at 03:18 PM
NDT, I'm shocked! It sounds to me that you want to "blow up" traditional marriage. Conferring different levels of benefits for procreative vs. non-procreative marriages? Radical!
Nowhere do I argue that one-man, one-woman is not "the best" proposition for raising kids. I think the arguments about which relationship is better are secondary to whether gays should enjoy marriage rights, but now that you raise the issue, I'm not entirely sure that I will concede your point.
I believe that the one ingredient that is the most essential to raising whole, healthy kids is love. That love is not dependent on the gender of the parents. I was raised by a wonnerful, loving mother, and a horrible, abusive, alcoholic father. All things are "rarely" equal, and I would always, everytime, everywhere prefer that a child be raised by a loving gay couple rather than in a dysfunctional, straight home.
For a gay couple to have or adopt a child, there is a conscious, deliberative decision involved that in my book -- all things being equal -- puts them miles ahead of the average straight couple who might be raising children as the result of an unintended pregnancy or lacking the same deliberation.
I think it is good for a child to have role models of both genders, but it is rare that both male and female role models will be found in the same home. And we are not talking about taking rights away from single parents, for example, just because they don't fit an ideal.
Perhaps what we need instead is marriage equality, but a license to allow people to become parents? (The absurdity of the question should be enough to answer itself, however.)
If one concedes, as I do, that homosexuality is exclusively or mostly a matter of genetics, then I believe there are some serious constitutional issues involved with keeping them out of the institution of civil marriage -- due process being not the least of them. That is why the movement is afoot to amend the constitution. Clearly, the proponents of the FMA concede there must be some constitutional rights in play, and the amendment process is the only way to head them off.
But more to the point, I think there is just a disingenuousness to Santorum's arguments. If he were not just a garden-variety bigot, then he would be focusing on what I see as far greater threats to children and families than allowing a few hundred thousand gay couples into his little personal playground of marriage.
Posted by: The Malcontent | August 08, 2005 at 03:44 PM
While I wouldn't go so far as to say 'one mom one dad' is the ideal living arrangement for a kid, I've got to agree with the main thrust of what Mal's saying. Are we gonna start requiring parental licenses for the straights? If mom's the breadwinner and dad's the stay-at-home kind is this going to mean confused gender roles? Sorry, Mr. Keaton, but we're not buying your "Mr. Mom" sacrilege.
I'm not a social psychologist. I don't know how important it is to have one dad and one mom in a family. But my gut tells me that, from a practical standpoint, it doesn't really matter. Honestly, if Courtney Love can marry and have a kid (still can't believe DCF hasn't yet fixed that situation), I think we should give the 'mos a crack at it too.
Posted by: Dan | January 27, 2006 at 01:58 PM
And if I remember correctly, those few studies that have been done on gay parents have shown that, if anything, lesbian couples do a 'better job' than their straight counterparts. Should the lesbos now get preference over the straights in the adoption process? Bottom line - it's a silly, misguided path to go down.
Posted by: Dan | January 27, 2006 at 02:10 PM
Dan: If you didn't see my "Barney Frank" post, go back and look at the video, even if you would disagree with most or all that I wrote.
What really struck me was the tone of the DOMA debate from 10 years ago and how over-the-top and mean-spirited it was.
The debates today can still be discouraging for gays, but apart from a few stray comments, you just don't hear quite that strident about gays in Congress anymore.
It does seem that at least a little has changed. In the last 10 years, the polls on acceptance of gays and gay marriage have shifted considerably, and I think the kind of comments some of those congressmen made in 1996 would get them in very hot water today.
Posted by: Malcontent | January 27, 2006 at 02:39 PM
Barney Frank. Oy. I want to like this guy, really. But have you ever seen him in action after a few cocktails? He's cleaned up his act a little, but still.
Anyway. Should shut up before the gay mafia takes me out.
Posted by: Dan | January 27, 2006 at 02:49 PM
No, but I have seen him naked, involuntarily. When I was in DC, he worked out at my gym, and he had to go and towel his bloated self off next to me.
Posted by: Malcontent | January 27, 2006 at 02:53 PM