Results matching “santorum”

How thoughtful of Pope John Paul II and the Vatican to reach out to me on my birthday, with their "Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons." With no regrets, however, I'd like to return the gift, as it just doesn't fit; I guess it was difficult for the Holy Father to shop for something appropriate with that huge log in his eye.

The hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, especially in categorizing homosexual unions as "evil," and in condemning the adoption of children by "persons living in [homosexual] unions" as "doing violence to these children," is particularly egregious. If "clear and emphatic opposition" is a moral duty, as this document maintains, then given the almost unparalleled violence against children perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic Church, its own members must clearly and emphatically oppose its assumed authority in such matters.

Pope Pius did not condemn the Nazis as "evil" on behalf of the Catholic Church, nor has the current Pope been willing to use that term to describe Saddam Hussein. Yet homosexual unions are branded as "evil," "immoral," "deviant" and "against natural moral law," and homsexuality as "objectively disordered": such inflammatory language is considered, by the Vatican, to express its "respect for homosexual persons."

Puh-lease. This definition of "respect" is more twisted even than Dubya's "welcoming" attitude toward homosexuals and the "inclusiveness, fairness, tolerance and compassion" (per Mssrs. Bush and Frist) of Senator Santorum. I don't need the Catholic Church's respect; I just need them to keep their inquisitional, collaborationist, pedophilic hands the hell out of my life.

Granted, this was in the works prior to last Thursday's Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, but it's picking up some new steam with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's statement yesterday on ABC's This Week. As reported in The Washington Post, Frist said that he supports a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages, introduced May 22 by Rep. Marilyn N. Musgrave (R-Colo.) and referred to the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution last Wednesday, one day before the Supreme Court decision.

One of the more disturbing elements of this revelation is in Frist's statement that "I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between--what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined--as between a man and a woman. So I would support the amendment." Sacrament is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as:

1. Christianity A rite believed to be a means of or visible form of grace, especially: a. In the Eastern, Roman Catholic, and some other Western Christian churches, any of the traditional seven rites that were instituted by Jesus and recorded in the New Testament and that confer sanctifying grace. b. In most other Western Christian churches, the two rites, Baptism and the Eucharist, that were instituted by Jesus to confer sanctifying grace.

2. A religious rite similar to a Christian sacrament, as in character or meaning.

If marriage is purely a sacrament, then it has no place in the law of this country; I suspect that laws designed to define baptism or the Eucharist would clearly be seen as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Religious conservatives shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways, then: either marriage is a religious sacrament, in which case it shouldn't be legislated by the state, nor should it confer any special benefits by the state to the parties married. If it is to confer special legal and civil benefits, however, then it should be divorced from its religious, sacramental underpinnings, and should be available to all citizens, regardless of the sex of the parties involved.

We need a clearer demarcation between the legal union of two people acknowledged and encouraged--through the range of legal benefits conferred--by the state, and the religious recognition of a commitment between two people; we probably shouldn't use the term "marriage" for both. Personally, I'd prefer if the state only recognized "civil unions" or "domestic partnerships" for all, heterosexual as well as homosexual, reserving the word "marriage" purely for religious ceremonies, which in and of itself would confer no special legal privileges.

The Post article also notes that "Frist said the Supreme Court's decision last week on gay sex threatens to make the home a place where criminality is condoned." So, despite the Supreme Court's recognition that gay sex is, in fact, not a criminal act, the Majority Leader of our Senate continues to equate the two. And this man, someone who so clearly does not understand the concept of "equal justice, for all," who named Rick Santorum as a "man of caring, compassion and tolerance," is the person leading our legislative branch. Thank goodness he's no longer practicing medicine, at least.

hear the clip

Transcript follows:

I did spend some time on the phone with my mother yesterday, for Mother's Day. I had sent flowers last week, which she got on Friday. I knew they'd be at church, and probably would go out for lunch afterwards (the extended family--mom and dad; sister, brother-in-law and their kids; dad's sister and brother-in-law; my cousins and their families--go out for lunch every Sunday after church, something they've done almost every week since I can remember), so I didn't bother trying to reach them until afternoon. I reached the answering machine the first time I called, so I waited and then tried again around 3:30. Dad picked up the phone then, and he and I chatted a bit; he'd been at my sister's, where the rest of the family still were, but had walked back home to pick up his DVD player so that he could show off the DVDs he'd recently burned from his old home movies on videotape (he'd been researching DVD burners for a while, and a couple of weeks ago bought a new computer with a burner).

<aside title= "background">
I grew up in a small mostly rural Virginia county, the entire population of which is about 13,000 now, with another 6,000 in the nearby city of Covington. Growing up, our only neighbors were family: my mother's parents lived next door, just through the woods; my grandmother's sister lived at the top of the hill; her brother-in-law ran the general store next to her house; and my great-grandmother lived in the big house on the other side of the main road. One of my dad's sisters and her family lived just a mile and a half away, in the same house in which she and dad had grown up. Dad's mother and stepfather lived just a few miles away, and his oldest sister lived next door to them.

My closest--practically my only--friends were my cousins. Not only did we see each other every day--we attended the same school and the same church--our families even took vacations at the same time and at the same place, a tradition that still continues to this day, just with more people as my generation (and now the next, with my oldest cousin's oldest daughter just having given birth) has its own children.

Before my dad's mother died, the Sunday tradition was to attend church together, go out for lunch together, then return home to change clothes, after which we'd all regroup at Nana's house later for dinner and more family time. More recently, my sister has taken on Nana's role, and she has the entire family over to her house on Sunday afternoons. This was where everyone was when I called to wish my mom a happy Mother's Day.

My sister and her family, by the way, now live in a house they built in the field behind my grandparents, and they and my parents together bought my great-aunt's house at the top of the hill; my sister hopes that her sons will stay in that little enclave as well. My oldest cousin and his wife built a house next door to my aunt--his mother--and their 20-something son still lives with them; my next oldest cousin, who was my best friend growing up, at 41 still lives with her parents. Only my youngest cousin and I moved away, me originally to Boston and then to DC, he first to Charlottesville, then to DC, but more recently to San Francisco after he got married.
</aside>

I called and my sister answered and, after the traditional exchange of teasing, she announced the call, also traditionally, from "the prodigal." My mother came to the phone, and we tried to chat, though it was extremely difficult to hear through the noise of twenty-odd (in both meanings), very loud people holding what sounded like 20-factorial simultaneous conversations. This aspect of my family tends to put some of my friends and boyfriends off-kilter; if you're not used to large, loud family gatherings, it can be very difficult to learn how to attend to the multitasked conversations that take place all at one time, all in one room. And the two boyfriends of which my family have most approved have been those who have been the most comfortable and adaptable in that one regard. Interestingly, those were also two of my relationships of the longest duration--though that's rather like praising one mayfly for living two days.

Mom and Dad filled me in on the latest news. Dad's eldest sister, Shirley, is home from the hospital now, though her situation isn't particularly hopeful; her heart tissue, apparently, is so badly deteriorated that the doctors don't believe surgery would be successful. Shannon--my oldest cousin's oldest child--just had a baby. Matthew, my sister's oldest boy, went to his junior prom this past weekend. Mom and Dad were hit by a deer on the way home from church last week, and now have car repairs of their own facing them. My cousin Charles and his wife Jennifer--Shirley's son and daughter-in-law--are expecting their second child, due in September. The county has been plagued by an unprecedented string of break-ins and burglaries. And Dad is enjoying the afore-mentioned recently purchased new computer and DVD burner.

Finally, my nephew Matthew took the phone to ask me "a favor." He wanted to know if he could come up and stay with me one weekend this summer; I said of course. I've tried to get him to come up and stay with me on his own before, but we've never been able to work that out.

Then he told me why he's planning to come up to DC this summer: there's a Republican teen convention, and he considers himself--at 16--to be a young Republican.

<heavy sigh />

It wasn't too many years ago that his mother, father and I all thought he might be gay, and here he is quite happily and comfortably dating girls and styling himself a Republican. What was I to do? Of course, I took a page from my hero Ron Santorum and told him that I had no problem with him, only with his Republican activities. <grin />

<aside title= "diversity">
My parents lived and grew up in a 1950s world that truly seems to have mirrored the world of 1950s television shows--Father Knows Best, Donna Reed, Leave it to Beaver, etc. My parents were practically child-hood sweethearts; at 12, my mother stated that my father, who was then 17, was the man she was going to marry. Virgins at their wedding, and naive enough about birth control that I was conceived on the honeymoon, they're still each other's best friends. I never met a child of divorce until I was a freshman in college; and the only divorced person in my family when I was a child was my grandfather's sister, who had moved to Washington, DC, "the big city" four hours away by car.

But my generation and the next have grown up in a different world certainly, and have brought that new world squarely to the doorstep of my parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. My mother's sister, whom I place in my own generation rather than my mother's since she was 12 years younger than my mother and only 7 years older than me, is on her third marriage; one cousin is on her second. Another cousin--from the one Catholic branch in a family of Protestants--married a Jewish woman. The cousin-once-removed--the one I noted above who just had a baby girl--is unmarried, and the father of her child is a black man. And I, of course, am the openly gay pink sheep of the family.

And now my nephew proclaims himself a Republican, so I guess there's some diversity in the family even I would prefer to do without.
</aside>

When I got home, All Things Considered was playing on the radio (I leave NPR on during the day for Alex, my cat), and I heard two stories in a row with gay themes; so I've been listening to the entire broadcast again, and the two stories were just replayed.

The first segment of interest was entitled "Hate Crimes": "Senators today called for laws that would expand federal penalties for violence against gays." Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) today reintroduced the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act (LLEEA), which would add real or perceived sexual orientation (along with gender and disability) to federal hate crimes legislation.

ATC host Robert Siegel suggested that the legislation may have been given new life by Rick Santorum's remarks about homosexuality (which I've ranted about extensively in this journal). Co-sponsor Gordon Smith (R-OR), described by Melissa Block as a "conservative Oregon Republican," noted:

...This is the right thing to do. It's the right time to do it. We are fighting a war on terrorism abroad and yet there's a war of terrorism at home, as is visited upon thousands of our countrymen every day.

In the next segment, "Detroit Gays Gentrify Neighborhoods", reporter Cheryl Corley took a look at a leading real estate developer that has advertised in the local gay newspaper, trying to attract gay residents to a downtown that is currently undergoing revival. The president of the development company, which is building loft apartments in these neighborhoods, made the following statement:

The gay community tends to have the guts to go into an area as pioneers, before the masses arrive. I think that the gay community also has the tendencies to actually go out and put their money where their mouth is and invest in the city around them.

Corley went on to state that "some researchers agree that cities with a sizable gay community can lead to a vibrant local economy," and she points to the "Gay Index" and "Creative Class Theory" by researcher Richard Florida (web site), Heinz Professor of Economic Development at Carnegie Mellon University and a current Visiting Scholar at the Brookings Institution here in DC. Florida's theory postulates that "communities that mix technology, talent and tolerance are the most successful."

Support your local NPR station; you generally won't hear positive stories like these on commercial radio, or on commercial or even cable television.

[Update: 2003-05-01 23:38] Gene also has written tonight about Richard Florida, from the perspective of posting about Florida's op-ed in USA Today.

A few quotes from the op-ed:

The key to understanding America's technological and economic vibrancy lies in our openness to new people and ideas. Tolerance of immigrants, gays and other minorities is much more important to sustained economic growth and the high-paying jobs than the tax cut President Bush has in mind.

...[T]he big new-ideas and cutting-edge industries that lead to sustained prosperity are more likely to exist where gay people feel welcome. Most centers of tech-based business growth also have the highest concentrations of gay couples. Conversely, major areas with relatively few gay couples tend to be slow- or no-growth places.

...Innovation and overall regional economic vitality also are closely associated with the presence of gays and other indicators of tolerance and diversity, such as the percentage of immigrants and the level of racial and ethnic integration.

Why? Creative, innovative and entrepreneurial activities tend to flourish in the same kinds of places that attract gays and others outside the norm.

...What's less well known, and what I've found in interviewing a wide range of people nationwide, is that more than a few heterosexual men and women say that they look for a "visible gay community" as a signal of a place that's likely to be both exciting and comfortable. These straight people also say they will ask if prospective employers if the firm offers same-sex partner benefits. They're looking for signs that nonstandard people--and ideas--are welcome.

This last paragraph above had me doing a double-take, and then elicited an incredible warm fuzzy feeling. This amazing statement actually managed to override my almost omnipresent and ever-mounting cynicism about America, at least for the moment. I don't think I want to read any more news this evening, for fear of losing that sense of hopefulness.

But I'm still cynical enough to note that I don't expect to see our President (or his "inclusive" friends in Congress) introduce a "Homosexual-Stimulus Plan" (or better yet, "Package") anytime soon--though the mere phrase may give me some nice dreams tonight.

The May 2003 issue of Scientific American offers an intriguing look at the likelihood of the existence of parallel universes or series of such universes--a "multiverse" (I always knew that my roleplaying past would come in handy some day)--as a result of the currently most popular cosmological model.

One of the many implications of recent cosmological observations is that the concept of parallel universes is no mere metaphor. Space appears to be infinite in size. If so, then somewhere out there, everything that is possible becomes real, no matter how improbable it is. Beyond the range of our telescopes are other regions of space that are identical to ours. Those regions are a type of parallel universe. Scientists can even calculate how distant these universes are, on average.

And that is fairly solid physics. When cosmologists consider theories that are less well established, they conclude that other universes can have entirely different properties and laws of physics. The presence of those universes would explain various strange aspects of our own. It could even answer fundamental questions about the nature of time and the comprehensibility of the physical world.

This article is not an easy read, obviously, but a fascinating one, and it offers one amusing "birds and frogs"--why do I suddenly find myself thinking about Hitchcock?--model for more readily understanding the many-worlds hypothesis:

[T]he outside view of a physicist studying its mathematical equations, like a bird surveying a landscape from high above it, and the inside view of an observer living in the world described by the equations, like a frog living in the landscape surveyed by the bird.

From the bird perspective, the Level III multiverse is simple. There is only one wave function. It evolves smoothly and deterministically over time without any kind of splitting or parallelism. The abstract quantum world described by this evolving wave function contains within it a vast number of parallel classical story lines, continuously splitting and merging, as well as a number of quantum phenomena that lack a classical description. From their frog perspective, observers perceive only a tiny fraction of this full reality. They can view their own Level I universe, but a process called decoherence--which mimics wave function collapse while preserving unitarity--prevents them from seeing Level III parallel copies of themselves.

Whenever observers are asked a question, make a snap decision and give an answer, quantum effects in their brains lead to a superposition of outcomes, such as "Continue reading the article" and "Put down the article." From the bird perspective, the act of making a decision causes a person to split into multiple copies: one who keeps on reading and one who doesn't. From their frog perspective, however, each of these alter egos is unaware of the others and notices the branching merely as a slight randomness: a certain probability of continuing to read or not.

As strange as this may sound, the exact same situation occurs even in the Level I multiverse. You have evidently decided to keep on reading the article, but one of your alter egos in a distant galaxy put down the magazine after the first paragraph. The only difference between Level I and Level III is where your doppelg�ngers reside. In Level I they live elsewhere in good old three-dimensional space. In Level III they live on another quantum branch in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.

I've always hoped that the theory of parallel universes and an infinite number of other mes was correct... it actually makes me feel better to know that even if I'm not getting laid, there are an infinite number of other mes that are... right at this very second, in fact.

And an infinite number of Rick Santorums are right now being topped by their Stanley Kurtz lovers. Ah, poetic justice.

This just in from Broken Newz:

"Senator Rick Santorum Wants to Sing With Elton John at Grammies"

After recently equating "sodomy," with bigamy, polygamy, and incest in an interview, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is attempting to mend bridges with the Gay community, perhaps by singing with Elton John at the next Grammies.

...He is [also] about to release his movie-acting debut, "Straight Mile" wherein he plays a struggling young Senator who excels in debates, but suffers from stage fright. In a small but telling scene in the film, Santorum defends a homosexual coworker, saying, "I have no problem with him being a homosexual, as long as he doesn't engage in homosexual behavior. Or lust in his heart, because that's a sin, too. Unfortunately, there isn't yet legislation in Texas making it illegal to lust in the heart, but just because I defend the right of Texas to lock up Ron here for getting laid doesn't mean I have anything against him....

Personally, I suspect he'll also be following in Eminem's footsteps by releasing his own line of clothing. Inspired by the "in-your-face hoodie" from Shady Ltd. that reads "You Got a Problem?", the hoodie from the Sanctus Ltd. line will sport the reply, "Only With Homosexual Acts."

The roll call of Republican congressmen standing behind Rick Santorum as a model of "inclusiveness" grew today with the addition of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (who didn't actually use the i-word, but who rather was "very proud of Rick Santorum standing on principle") and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who said "[Santorum] is our greatest champion [emphasis mine] for inclusiveness and fairness."

Sadly, this latter statement is starting to have a ring of truth.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist reiterated his support today for Mr. Santorum by noting that the "man of caring, compassion and tolerance" has "100 percent confidence" of Senate Republicans.

"Tolerance": now those Republicans have gone and ruined another perfectly good word.

[update 2003-04-30 18:25: I missed the fact that Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Whip, also praised Santorum's inclusiveness yesterday: "A variety of us have said in one way or another we know Rick Santorum, we know he's not a bigot. He's an inclusive senator."

Meanwhile, a Baptist Church in North Carolina was expelled from a local Baptist association last night for baptizing two gay men. We keep being told vis a vis the Santorum incident that many who are religious subscribe to a "hate the sin, love the sinner" philosophy. Would someone explain to me how withholding baptism (not that it really matters to me, since 1) I don't believe in heaven or hell or an angry white man up in the fluffy clouds; and 2) any jealous, snippy god that might condemn any of its creations, which it's supposed to love, to eternal damnation, really isn't worth loving or worshiping anyway) is the sign of a loving Christian orientation?

Wasn't up too terribly late last night; I think I was in bed between 2 and 2:30, and didn't get up for good (I was up once to feed the cat, and awake several other times from about 6:30 am on) until about 11:45. I remember just bits and pieces of dreams from last night; one sequence that is still with me was my being at some sort of combination house-antique store-musuem, in which lived a big cat (I'm pretty sure it was a Russian Blue). I was trying to leave through one of the back doors, and the cat kept running over to try to get out (this is exactly the behavior of Alex--my Maine Coon--when I go to leave the condo). He did manage to get past me, and out the door, but I snagged him up and brought him back; he was licking me and kissing me the whole time.

A number of days later, I was visiting my parents, and they told me that they believed the cat had rabies, but that it had gotten out again and no one had been able to find it to confirm it, so I would have to start prophylactic treatment. It had been long enough since I'd been there, that there was concern that the disease might already have taken effect. Yet I was procrastinating making the call for an appointment with a doctor (just as I continue to do in real life). And that's all I remember.

For more than a week I've been spending a lot of time struggling with my installation of Movable Type, the software with which this journal was created and is maintained. Several weeks ago I had upgraded to the most recent version, and things had been working fine until sometime over a week ago when I started getting time-outs, internal server errors, and page not found errors when rebuilding new entries or rebuilding the entire site. I hadn't changed anything. I visited the support forums for the software, and other people were describing the same thing--many noting that the problem had only come after upgrading to the current version, and often only on some blogs within an installation but not others, and seemingly out of the blue after working normally for a while. No one so far has been able to completely resolve it or even tie it to any specific cause.

My frustration has been growing, and yesterday I spent almost the entire time between noon and 8pm, except for a few bio and meal breaks, working on the blug (to be fair, a good deal of that time also was spent looking at other blogs, adding some new functionality, etc.). I finally did get the overall rebuilds to begin working correctly again--by decreasing the number that are built at once, even though this had never before been a problem--but this entry will be my first test of whether new postings also are reliably working.
[Update: it did work, hoorah; and this re-saving of it with the update will be a test of that functionality, which had been breaking as well, seemingly at the point where it normally would try to ping.]
[Update of Update: no, the resaving of an item still is causing a time out and pings not to be sent, though at least the actual text changes do get saved to the database and thence to the site.]
[Another Update: well, it seems to be related to categories; if I only have one category when building an item, it builds fine. When I add additional categories and rebuild it, it times out and fails. And when rebuilding the entire site, it was the category archiving that was failing along with individual entries. So I've turned category archives off, and now everything is working fine.]

I watched Some Like It Hot for the first time last night (yes, I know--believe me, if I had ever had a gay card, it would have been taken away from me, shredded, and the pieces burned and buried in a landfill many years ago. I saw my very first Opera--not counting a college production of Don Juan--just a month ago, too.). Really enjoyed it, and some of the queer subtext was quite funny.

After the movie I went into There, briefly, in a good mood, where I joined Matt, Lee and Roger already in a conversation. Matt and I started talking about Santorum's comments, the President's description of the man as "inclusive," and the phenomenon of "bug-chasing" and other real-world topics, but Lee and Roger left the conversation--Lee didn't want that part of the real world to intrude upon the game. So eventually we re-joined them, where they were continuing to explore the range of clothes and grooming options for their avatars, but by then I was feeling pissy and bored, and Matt was feeling just bored, so he logged out to watch some TV, and I logged out to do some other things.

I don't mean to make Roger and Lee come off as prissy little gay bois only interested in clothes and looks--in real life, they're not at all like that, though in game they do sometimes get rather caught up in shopping for their avatars and trying on lots of different looks (and I've certainly done my share of that off-and-on in game, too). It was just the particular circumstances of last night, of coming into game feeling really up and social, and feeling a little shot down because I was engaging in heavier conversation. At the same time, I can understand how they felt. Geez, I'm always so wishy-washy about describing even the mildest conflict, since I want to be so fair about presenting all sides and not always assuming I was in the right; in this case, certainly, there were no right or wrong sides, just different moods and tastes.

This is related to an email exchange between Gene Cowan and I on Friday in which we touched on the first--and unpleasantly unsuccessful--virtual contact he and I had had around 1995; his blog query about whether he should include more personal diary-like entries; and how other people that one writes about--and who might read these entries--might feel or react to being discussed in this sort of forum, often from a purely one-sided perspective.

Bad, wicked, naughty brain! Always thinking and rethinking and processing and reprocessing every little detail and every little fear. Sometimes I wish it would just shut up.

Eleanor Clift (newsweek.com) on why Santorum is in no jeopardy of being Lotted (I hope I've just coined that).

Some quotes:

The base [of the Republican party] identifies with Santorum. He's their champion. At the first hint of controversy, powerful figures on the right flooded the White House with calls warning "not to walk away from Rick."

The White House is behind Santorum. More than anybody in the leadership, he's their guy. Hardcore and ambitious, he goes to the wall for every Bush initiative and for every right-wing cause. He's leading the party's fight against reproductive cloning and stem-cell research, and is working to pass an exclusion to allow faith-based groups that receive federal money to practice discrimination in hiring that would otherwise be illegal.

Bush knows that to break with Santorum would cost him dearly with his conservative base. Asked for Bush's reaction to Santorum's broadside against gays, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer reached new heights of verbal gymnastics. He said the president doesn't typically comment on Supreme Court cases. When the reporter pointed out that Bush had spoken out quite a lot about the Michigan affirmative-action case currently before the court, Fleischer said, "That's why I said--typically." Fleischer did say, though, that the president thinks Santorum is "an inclusive man." When it comes to entertainment, Fleischer is on his way to matching the Iraqi information minister.

Again with the "inclusive" label, first from Frist and now from Bush via Fleischer. How much clearer can the Republicans be on just what they really think about gay people? We're so far outside that tent that someone who unabashedly and unapologetically spews hateful nonsense implying that we are the equivalent of child molesters can be hailed as a paragon of inclusiveness. This is the true face, not just of Rick Santorum, but of George Bush and his compassionate conservatism.

What Fleischer said:

But the president believes that the senator is an inclusive man. ... The president has confidence in Senator Santorum and thinks he's doing a good job as senator--including in his leadership post.

Are we surprised that this is the definition of "inclusive" propounded by Mr. Bush? When governor of Texas, he said he would veto any attempt to overturn the state's sodomy law--the very case before the Supreme Court now that has loosened Santorum's lips... I'd have liked to have said "that has gotten Santorum in trouble," but it's clear that he won't get into trouble just for bashing us queers--calling the sodomy law "a symbolic gesture of traditional values."

Ah, thanks to Andrew Sullivan's blog for pointing me to today's Chicago Sun-Times editorial. Here's perhaps the best line I've seen so far in the debate over Santorum:

And one last point. How can we have any hope of creating a democratic government in Iraq free from domination by repressive religion if we cannot free our own laws of official faith-based biases inflicted on our fellow citizens?

And here's one of Sullivan's thoughts about Mr. Bush's statement today about the "inclusive" Mr. Santorum:

It hurts me to say this, Mr President, but your statement today has just made matters far worse. Senator Santorum believes that gay people should be subject to criminal prosecution for their private, adult consensual relationships. He has equated homosexuality with the abuse of minors. He has associated homosexual relationships with bestiality. If that is an example of "inclusiveness," then what would exclusiveness be? For the president to call the criminalization of an entire group of people the position of an "inclusive man" leaves me simply speechless. It indicates that the White House still doesn't understand the damage that this incident is doing, the fact that it is beginning to make it simply impossible for gay people and their families--or any tolerant person--to vote for the president's party.

Well, I never imagined that the conservative Sullivan and I--cute though Andrew may be--would be bedfellows, but there you have it. Oops... is that the police I hear knocking at the door?

Wow... with apologies to my two gay friends employed by McPaper, I have to admit I was surprised to find such a queer-friendly editorial as this in USA Today.

When commenting that Santorum's positions in the Senate and in the Republican hierarchy seem secure even after his remarks comparing homosexuality to incest, and suggesting that the state has the right to legislate consensual adult sexual activity within one's own home, the editorial noted, "That's because too many people in the GOP either forthrightly agree with his views or cluelessly wonder why an apology is required." It continued, "Neither scenario bodes well for a party that needs to show it can govern a divided nation in the short term and expand its political base over the long run."

Let's hope they're right.

The article also points out that, "[r]ushing to Santorum's defense, Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee only made matters worse on Tuesday, when he said: 'Rick is a consistent voice for inclusion and compassion in the Republican Party.' If Santorum is the GOP's idea of inclusive, that fact is best left unadvertised."

<chuckle>

Meanwhile, Olympia Snowe, fortunately, continues to be a breath of fresh air. On the heels of her stance against Bush's "Leave No Millionaire Behind" tax-cut strategy, she has spoken out against Santorum's comments:

Discrimination and bigotry have no place in our society, and I believe Senator (Rick) Santorum's unfortunate remarks undermine Republican principles of inclusion and opportunity.

Hey, wouldn't it be interesting to see a cross-party Dean/Snowe ticket for the 2004 presidential election?

Oh, and I love the reaction Santorum's remarks are getting from Andrew Sullivan. This has really pissed him off at the "conservative" leadership within the Republican party. Yeah!

His blog entries for today and yesterday show an impassioned sense of betrayal by others who deem themselves to be conservatives. Here are some quotes:

But something this basic as the freedom to be left alone in own's own home is something I naively assumed conservatives would obviously endorse--even for dispensable minorities like homosexuals. I was wrong. The conclusions to be drawn are obvious.

This is not about homosexuality as such. It is about the principles of limited government, tolerance, civility, compassion and the soul of the Republican party. There are no deeper political issues. No war is worth fighting if our political leaders feel contempt for basic liberties at home. I realized this more profoundly after reading Santorum's full remarks, which are far more alarming than the small, doctored quote that created the immediate fuss.

[quoting a letter to him] "If Santorum is somehow representative of what is conservatism in the United States today, then I say no thank you to it."

Me too.

It's hard to find the right analogy, but it's not that far from saying that you have nothing against Jews, as long as they go to Church each Sunday. (Which was, of course, the Catholic position for a very long time.) Worse actually. It's like saying that, even if Jews practised their religion at home, in private, they could still be arrested for undermining the social order. Their very persistence in their identity--which harms and could harm no-one else--is a threat. Do you think someone who said that would remain a leading pillar of the Republican Party?.

The rest of the GOP is maintaining silence. Thanks, guys. We get the message. As one reader put it, "I was warming to the Republicans over Iraq. But statements like these have me running back to the Democrats." I can fully see why.

What he disapproves of mustn't only be denied public recognition; it must be criminalized. If you think I'm exaggerating, read his full comments. They are not a relic of a bigoted past, as Trent Lott's were. But they are an expression of a bleak future, in which tolerance and privacy are subject to the approval of "moral" majorities and enforced by the police. If that truly is his view, he needs to explain it further. And the Republican party has to ask itself if it wants an unconservative extremist as one of its leaders.

Oh, I love this.

Regarding Santorum's comments about consensual gay sex being equivalent to incest or adultery, the Washington Post now reports that his "spokeswoman Erica Clayton Wright said the quote was accurate 'only in the context related specifically to the right to privacy in the Supreme Court case.' The senator, she said, 'has no problem with gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender individuals.'"

So, he has no problem with us... just as long as we keep the sex out of our own bedrooms.

Um... whuuuuh? Did he hire this spokeswoman from Bizarro World? Did she get her PR degree from the same school as Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf? Is this statement even supposed to be accepted as a cogent explanation, much less a retraction or apology?

The Associated Press (by way of washingtonpost.com) has reported that Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) today, in an interview with the AP in which he discussed the expected decision later this summer from the Supreme Court on a case involving consensual homosexual sex in a private home in Texas, compared consensual gay sex in the home to incest and adultery, and went on to say that he believes there is no constitutional right to privacy:

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual 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... All of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution."

Fortunately, even the Log Cabin Republicans are taking a big step back and calling him on the carpet for this one:

"There is nothing conservative about allowing law enforcement officials to enter the home of any American and arrest them for simply being gay," said Log Cabin Republican Executive Director Patrick Guerriero. "I am deeply troubled that Sen. Santorum would divide America in a time of war. Mainstream America is embracing tolerance and inclusion. I am appalled that a member of the United States Senate leadership would advocate dividing Americans with ugly, hate-filled rhetoric."

This is the same Santorum, a self-described "compassionate conservative" and as the head of the Republican Conference the third highest ranking Senate Republican, who was quoted as saying to the Washington Post last November that he supports a provision that would allow faith-based groups that receive federal funding for community service programs to discriminate against gays and lesbians in hiring--even in cases where local and state non-discrimination laws are already in place. "I will make that stand," said Santorum. (from a news release from the Human Rights Campaign, November 25, 2002.)

In January of this year, the Philadelphia CityPaper ran an opinion piece entitled "A Friend to the End: Rick Santorum's Questionable Defense of Trent Lott," in which the author noted:

Our senator [Santorum] went on national television and claimed that Lott was "a man of tremendous integrity, a deep faith, [and] someone who believes all men are created equal." He added that the furor would subside when his colleagues "reflect and put things in better context," a dubious statement given the context of Lott's terrible civil rights record.

As the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, Santorum originally opposed even calling a meeting of Senate Republicans to discuss Lott's remarks and potential replacement, telling NBC's Tim Russert, "It's not under our rules to allow me to do that." A few days later, under pressure from his more moderate colleagues, Santorum reversed himself by calling a meeting for Jan. 6. But Santorum continued to defend Lott, even as more evidence of Lott's poor civil rights record came out, telling reporters on Dec. 18, "I'm more and more convinced that Senator Lott should stay."

Santorum didn't stop at defending Lott. He told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that "he personally never viewed Thurmond, who just retired as the Senate's longest serving member, as a segregationist."

No wonder, since the three of them seem cut from the same cloth.

This guy is really scary, though at least we know where he stands and that he's not our friend.