Rick Santorum Made Some Really Awkward Gay Remarks on The Rachel Maddow Show

"But I suspect that there’s all sorts of reasons that people end up the way they are. And I’ll sort of leave it at that."

“So if you can determine whether one of your children is gay, should we pass a law saying you can’t abort a child because you found out that child’s going to be gay? You can’t abort a child because you found out that child was going to be a woman? How would you feel about a law like that?”

Huh?

This was Rick Santorum‘s answer when pressed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on whether or not he believed people were born gay or transgender. Kind of strange, right? The Republican Presidential hopeful clashed with Maddow on a wide spectrum of LGBT rights on her show last evening, nicely captured by Politico‘s Nick Gass.

Santorum went on to say that he knows “people who are alive today who identified themselves as gay and lesbian and who no longer are. That’s true. I do know, I’ve met people in that case. So I guess maybe in that case, maybe they did…But I suspect that there’s all sorts of reasons that people end up the way they are. And I’ll sort of leave it at that.”

Maddow then asked Santorum to discuss his 2003 remarks where he suggested that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws banning consensual same-sex activity, would lead to “man on child [and] man on dog” sexual acts. Looking back, Santorum stated, “It was a flippant comment that shouldn’t have come out of my mouth. But the substance of what I said, which is what I’ve referred to, I stand by that. I wish I had not said it in a flippant term that I did, and I know people were offended by it, and I wish I hadn’t said it.”

Don’t you just love Presidential campaign season?