Sen. Rick Santorum is the latest Republican political leader to walk down Trent Lott’s trail of tears.  Why do Republicans continue to make these gaffes?  Most politicians, after all, have spent their entire lives since elementary school telling people what they want to hear, and they ought to realize that the power they hold in their hands does not belong to them: Political power is a p.r. creation, a gift from the media, a will-o’-the-wisp that can be dispelled the first time they step out of line and speak their minds.  Why do they never learn?

If Trent Lott’s sin was to persist in thinking that a Mississippian did not have to repudiate the South and all it stood for, Santorum’s sin was to believe that he might articulate the moral attitudes held by most Americans until nearly the end of the 20th century.  Even during the Carter years, the very concept of “gay rights” evoked mirth even from liberals.  Even though most Americans still recoil from the notion of gay rights, it is now the public consensus, watched over by homosexual-advocacy groups and policed by the media.

Senator Santorum’s fatal gaffe was his comment on a Texas case before the Supreme Court.  Two men, convicted of sodomy according to Texas law, were basing their appeal on the right to perform sexual acts within the privacy of a home.  Santorum, known for making off-the-cuff statements, replied:

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.

 

Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

Although Santorum has plausibly explained his remarks as a slippery-slope argument that does not necessarily equate all of the vices on his list, he is clearly, at the very least, uncomfortable with the idea of a right to sodomy.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, homosexual activists and lobbyists chose to express outrage.  Admittedly, Santorum’s list of illicit sexual activities is incoherent.  All that sodomy, bigamy, poly-gamy, adultery, and incest have in common is that they are illegal in Texas and some other places.  Although sodomy, technically, may occur within marriage, it is typically interpreted as a sexual act between males, who, by an almost-but-not-quite universal definition cannot be married.

How could two men having casual sex object to being lumped in with adulterers and bigamists who have violated the rules of marriage?  If anything, Santorum, in comparing sodomy with adultery, has given homosexuality a kind of promotion toward quasi-respectability.  Even incest, although it may involve the sexual abuse of children, might also be a consenting act of fornication between adults or a marriage between people too closely related.  The idea of “gay rights” advocates turning up their noses at practitioners of incest and adultery is ludicrous.  Talk about unholier than thou!

If anyone has a right to be angry, it is the polygamists (Muslims and Middle Eastern Jews) or members of religions that once permitted polygamy (Mormons and European Jews).  As a Christian, I regard polygamy as a serious distortion of marriage and the family, but it should not be equated with activities that Christians regard as either sinful or perverse.  No word yet from Iran or from the Mormon temple, though the head of the United Apostolic Brethren (a group of Mormon traditionalists in Utah) has expressed dissatisfaction with Santorum’s comments and accuses him of slandering a religious tradition that goes back to Moses.

Senator Santorum (as his name suggests) is Catholic, and it cannot come as a surprise to homosexuals to learn that all committed Catholics regard both homosexual urges and homosexual acts as sinful.  (There are pro-homosexualists who call themselves Catholic, but, then, there are also people who call themselves Napoleon.)  The Church’s stand, shared by all traditional Christian churches, is hardly unusual.  Nearly every known society has regulated or prohibited homosexual behavior, though enforcement was often admittedly slack.  Propagandists like Martha Nussbaum may twist the evidence all they like, but they cannot evade the fact that even the permissive Greeks did not give free rein to homosexuals.  At Athens, openly “gay” men were forbidden, on pain of death, from exercising the most fundamental right of Athenian citizens, that of attending the assembly.  

Of course, Christians may have been quite wrong to stigmatize homosexuality, and human history may be the black hole of sadistic repression described by leftists, but until the classics of Western literature are burned and Christianity outlawed, it is hard to blame a self-styled “moderate conservative” for believing what most people have always believed—until the Reagan and Bush administrations caved in to the homosexual lobby.

The only conclusion to be drawn from the Santorum affair is that American liberals will not be satisfied until it is illegal for Christians to repeat the traditional teachings of their Church.  But that, after all, is the ultimate objective of all forms of liberalism, whether that of Enlightenment philosophes, classical liberals, or Marxian leftists.  As Voltaire put it, “Ecrasez l’infame.”  Most Christians, for their part, refuse to fight back or even to defend them-selves.  “This is still a Christian country,” they shriek, in their demonstrations protesting the killing of millions of unborn children.  “We are defending Christian civilization,” they cry, as they send out America’s youth to take over Iraq and denounce the bishops who issue a moral challenge to the American government.  

The Church today faces as serious a crisis as the early Church did, when weak-kneed believers renounced Christ in the face of torture and death.  Today, they renounce all Christian teaching rather than face public disapproval.  The good news is that James Dobson and Focus on the Family are threatening to bolt the Republican Party in the 2004 election if it does not take a strong stand in defense of Senator Santorum.  If they were to hold out, it would be the first positive step they have taken to restore the soul of the Republican Party.