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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The White House masters the art of saying little, and a would-be scandal about a senator's anti-gay remarks seems to fade away.
May 1, 2003 | Tuesday marked a week and a day since the Associated Press published the controversial remarks of Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., in which he seemed to equate gay sex with incest and possibly even bestiality. It was the fourth day since President Bush said, through a spokesman, that Santorum was an "inclusive man" who was "doing a good job as senator -- including in his leadership post." (Santorum is the No. 3 in the Senate GOP.) And it was the day Santorum himself was enthusiastically welcomed at a Senate GOP lunch, after which Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee declared him to have "the full, 100 percent confidence of the Republican leadership in the United States Senate."
And with that, the furor seems all but over. A story broke in the Wednesday Philadelphia Inquirer that showed Santorum -- shortly after 9/11 -- fundraising for an anti-gay group promising to protect heterosexual marriage from "homosexual activists." The letter, mailed in early 2002, could be "truly the most important letter I ever write you," Santorum said, acknowledging that that "may sound like a huge exaggeration, particularly in light of the attack on America."
But it seemed to cause only a ripple of attention; no questions were even asked about it at Wednesday's White House press briefing.
The White House wanted the story to go away, and last week, along with leaders of the RNC, the administration instructed Republican officials in a conference call to stop commenting on the scandal altogether. That seemed to be that. The White House subscribed to its long-held theory that on issues surrounding gay and lesbian rights, silent = smart. With such hot-button issues on which Americans hold nebulous and self-contradictory feelings -- majorities support treating gays and lesbians equally but also think them immoral -- vagueness seems to have a certain political wisdom. It disappoints both gay voters and those who loathe them, but it provides politicians enough wiggle room to slide by unscathed.
Bush -- and to a degree, Santorum -- may even be able to survive the ire of some Republican gays. "To call Sen. Santorum 'inclusive,' I think was letting people see what they want to see," says David Greer, former president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group. "Does Sen. Santorum believe gays should be in the Republican Party? And was President Bush endorsing that? Yes." But Bush didn't comment on the content of Santorum's remarks themselves. "So I thought it was a carefully crafted response on the White House's part," says Greer.
Those already historically critical of Bush, of course, are still angry. David Smith, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's leading gay and lesbian lobby, says that Bush's comments "call into question what he means by 'inclusive.' Santorum doesn't think gay people should have constitutional protections" and he employed a "rhetorical political trick linking being gay with all these nefarious activities" -- bigamy, polygamy, incest and bestiality. The support of self-regarded "compassionate conservative" Bush "calls into question how deep his compassion is," Smith says.
Santorum's comments, after all, were fairly harsh. Asked about the privacy issues surrounding an anti-sodomy law debated in the Supreme Court review of Lawrence and Garner vs. Texas, Santorum said that "if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy," polygamy, incest and adultery, acts all "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family." Historically, Santorum said, society has viewed the institution of marriage as applying only to a man and a woman because they can procreate, while others cannot -- like homosexuals, "man on child, [or] man on dog."
Though he's disgusted by Santorum's comments and disappointed that the president didn't say anything to repudiate them, the HRC's Smith sees some progress in this area. "I believe that he's been weakened by it," he says. Santorum has "shown that there's a price to be paid" for such comments, he says, even if it's "clearly not commensurate with the price Lott paid" for his December 2002 comments in favor of the 1948 segregationist presidential campaign of Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. The Santorum controversy was a veritable Watergate compared to the reactions sparked by previous anti-gay statements from GOP politicians.
