REMOVE SANTORUM?
Gay groups are steamed at Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum because he said something they didn't like. Here's what he said:In an interview with The Associated Press, Santorum criticized homosexuality while discussing a pending Supreme Court case over a Texas sodomy law.
"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," Santorum, R-Pa., said in the interview, published Monday.
It's an odd sort of slippery-slope argument, and one that's not likely to gain much traction one way or the other in the debate over sodomy laws, and deserves criticism. But is it a removable offense? Human Rights Campaign thinks so:
We're urging the Republican leadership to condemn the remarks. They were stunning in their insensitivity, and they're the same types of remarks that sparked outrage toward Sen. Lott," said David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay advocacy organization. "We would ask that the leadership reconsider his standing within the conference leadership."
To which I say "Balderdash!" Note whom the HRC singles out for criticism here--Sen. Lott, the left's favorite whipping boy. It should be pointed out that when Sen. Lott got into trouble, the GOP cleaned the mess up itself, not because pressure from the left forced it to, but because internal dissension made it necessary. Rank and file Republicans wanted Lott out of his post as Senate majority leader because he'd shown such awful judgement, as well as the offensive substance of his remarks. His history of questionable comments didn't help him here either.
Note also whom the HRC didn't single out for comparison. HRC didn't compare Santorum's comments to former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, whose anti-Semitic rants got her bounced out of office. The HRC didn't compare Santorum to Rep. Jim Moran, whose anti-Semitic remarks get him into trouble fairly regularly. The HRC didn't compare Santorum to Rep. Patty Murray, who praised Osama bin Laden's Third World charity work while lamenting America's comparative lack of charity (which is true, provided you don't count the foreign aid budget, the UN budget, and the Peace Corp as well as scads of US-based non-government actors providing food, medicine and other essentials to the world's starving every single day, and provided you don't count the rebuilding of Japan and Europe that the US underwrote after World War II. If you don't count all that, sure, Osama may be more charitable than the US...). The HRC didn't compare Santorum to Rep. Mary Kaptur, who compared Osama bin Laden to George Washington. And the HRC didn't compare Santorum to the other HRC--Hillary Clinton--who has never really been given a sufficient blast for her "Jew bastard" comment. Why didn't the HRC bring up any of these names? They're all Democrats. It all comes down to partisanship.
As a result, they'll get no traction with me. To their calls for Santorum's removal, I say "Absolutely not." Forget it. You folks have no credibility.
What I see going on here is a "separate from the herd" strategy. When a Dem says something absurd, the party aparatchiks circle around them and try their best to protect them from criticism. They'll use any weapon at hand--they'll cite free speech, censhorship, whatever, as though political criticism automatically becomes sinister when it's directed in their direction. But when a Republican says something dumb or wrong, the lefty groups attack in packs, trying to separate the unfortunate Republican from the rest and kill them off politically. They first tried it with Bush, smearing allegations that he ran away from 9-11, or that he planned the whole thing, or that he's opportunistically using it to benefit his oil buddies. That got nowhere, so they tried a similar strategy against Cheney, which also went nowhere. Then they went after Rumsfeld with the "not enough troops" angle, and though they're still running that one in some quarters the war's outcome has largely refuted it. They made it work against Lott, largely because his history suggested they might be on to something. Now, the left is just looking for Republicans to step out somewhere and say something edgy. When it happens, the left's jackal squads will pounce. They tried it with Secretary of Education Rod Paige a week or so back, when he said something innocuous yet positive about Christian schools. They're doing it to Bush's judicial nominees--separating them from the administration by calling them "extremists," etc and blocking floor votes. Because of his gay marriage comment, Santorum happens to be the today's potential carrion.
UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru takes on Andrew Sullivan's take and dices it. And here is the original interview in which Santorum courted trouble. It's fairly clear to me that the AP reporter is baiting Santorum with provacative lines of questioning. It's also abundantly clear that Sen. Santorum is making an essentially legal argument that striking down sodomy laws will create a slippery slope leading to the legalization of all sexual practices. Whether you agree with the senator's assessment or not, that's the point he's making--he never equates homosexuality with beastiality, as much of the coverage seems to insinuate.