Santorum Got It Half Right

I've taken some time to digest Rick Santorum's comments that gay sex somehow threatens our social order, and to the pessimists who say the senator's head is half empty, I'd suggest that maybe it's really half full.

Attack the young senator's ignorance and arrogance as you like, but how long can you stay mad at the guy once you consider he's probably got 30 or 40 colleagues who think the same way, even if they're not telling? What got lost amid the hubbub over Santorum's expressed disdain for homosexuals was his readiness — in not so many words — to condemn another, larger group, one that has done far more damage to our social fabric than any other. You probably even know a few of them: heterosexuals.

Santorum is a devout Catholic, but when he sat down with an Associated Press reporter in April and made a case in support of antiquated state sodomy laws, he didn't try to club the woman over the head with the Book of Deuteronomy. For all his religious zealotry, Santorum likes to claim a useful, secular purpose behind his blinkered intolerance. Some may see this as a self-justifying habit of mind that makes Santorum a dangerous nut. I'm wondering if he's more like Saul on the road to Damascus, just a smack in the head away from wisdom and good works.

To this upright, uptight father of six, government has a compelling practical interest in restricting sexual urges outside marriage, which is why he believes there is no Constitutional right to privacy in the bedroom: “If the Supreme Court says you have the right to any kind of consensual sex in your own 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.”

When the reporter asked him if he'd outlaw homosexuality, he replied, “I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts.” His ultimate concern, he says, is protecting the institution of the family: “Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.”

Now, Rick must know that if every adulterer and sex freak in the Senate was arrested, he'd soon have Capitol Hill all to himself. Yet the outcry provoked by his comments came almost exclusively from gay groups, and Santorum's many defenders should ask themselves why. Why, after all, are there so many gay-rights groups in Washington, while Adulterers of America can't afford one single lobbyist? Why has President Bush appointed two gay foreign ambassadors but can't find any spots for bigamists? How come gay conservatives have a club called the Log Cabin Republicans, but the Oedipus Caucus of the GOP has yet to meet?

The obvious answer is that gay people — loathsome though they may be to some — are a threat to no one. The more closely you look at the social pathologies run amok in our land, the radical right's condemnation of gay sex makes less and less of the common sense claimed for it. In truth, it is heterosexual misadventure that provides the American family with almost all of its troubles. Unwanted pregnancy, illegitimacy and abortion are hetero phenomena. So is adultery. Knocked-up high-schoolers, deadbeat dads, battered women — against this backdrop of assaults on healthy families, gay people are mere bystanders.

In fact, the main source of the creeping permissiveness that's eating away at the family is the silent growth of adulterer rights, not gay rights. Once illegal in most states, adultery is no longer even a meaningful issue in divorce and custody battles. And few enjoy this family-busting right to adultery more than the so-called “family values” crowd. Ronald Reagan remains the only divorced president, and Nancy, pregnant on their wedding day, was First Lady and First Homewrecker. Newt Gingrich cheated on his wife with a congressional aide all through the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. (The aide later became the third Mrs. Gingrich.) Bob Dole, Henry Hyde, Rudy Giuliani — the list goes on and on. They may speculate all they want about what gay people do, but on the subject of adultery and broken families, these people are the experts.

How do they get away with it? It's easy. Privacy advocates are saps. They can't bring themselves to condemn anyone's private behavior, which means they're always fighting with one arm tied behind their backs. But the best defense for privacy rights is a good offense. Gay advocates in particular need to start playing the hypocrisy card, “outing” every serial philanderer who claims some logical social purpose for his instinctive bigotry. Shift the debate on moral decay to the very real problems of divorce, illegitimacy and other hetero indiscretions, and it's easy to see just whose private behavior exacts the most brutal costs on society and the family.

In the end, the thought of gay sex may remain a repulsive one to Rick Santorum, but in that regard, he's entirely entitled to his privacy.