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Supreme Court Proved Santorum Right
Philadelphia Daily News ^ | 7/3/03 | Michael Smerconish

Posted on 07/03/2003 10:35:26 PM PDT by LdSentinal

NOW THAT THE Supreme Court has ruled on the Texas sodomy statute, we need to revisit Rick Santorum's comments about homosexuality in that now-famous interview with the Associated Press.

Rick Santorum was right in anticipating a very political decision.

Three months ago he said this:

"We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basis tenets of our society and the family. 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. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right was created, it was created in Griswold v. Griswold was the contraception case - and abortion."

There is a legitimate legal basis for Santorum's view.

The Supreme Court did not recognize sodomy as a fundamental right under the Due Process Clause. Instead, the court describes the Texas plaintiffs as engaging in "an exercise of their liberty." And this was the basis of the court's declaration that the Texas Penal Code imposes constraints on liberty.

This is what led Justice Scalia to note the following in his dissent:

"So do laws prohibiting prostitution, recreational use of heroin, and for that matter, working more than 60 hours per week in a bakery. But there is no right to "liberty" under the Due Process Clause, though today's opinion repeatedly makes that claim. The Fourteenth Amendment expressly allows states to deprive their citizens or "liberty" so long as "due process of law" is provided:

"No state shall...deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

Santorum was warning about the same slippery slope. Spare me your hate letters for defending his legal argument.

I myself don't like the Texas statute. In my view of the world, there should not be statutes that prohibit two unrelated, consenting adults of the same species from doing whatever they want behind closed doors. I just wish the Texas legislature had reached that conclusion, not the Court. I'm not sure whether that procedural difference would've made much of a difference to Santorum.

His is a very conservative and deeply religious view of the world. Consider that in the same interview where reference to "bigamy" "polygamy" and "incest" garnered attention, Santorum also said this:

"In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

Huh? Man on dog? That is just bizarre. Or the insight we received in this, the final paragraph of the original AP story:

"He and his wife, Karen, have seven children - including, as Santorum puts it, "the one in heaven."

Their fourth baby, Gabriel Michael, died in 1996, two hours after an emergency delivery in Karen Santorum's 20th week of pregnancy. The couple took Garbriel's body home to let their three other young children see and hold the baby before burying him, according to Karen Santorum's book of the ordeal, "Letters to Gabriel."

Took the baby home? I have never heard of such a thing and wanted to read it for myself. Indeed, on pages 882 to 884, Karen Santorum explains not wanting Gabriel to be sent to the morgue ("a dark refrigerated room").

So instead, soon after Gabriel's passing, she and the senator slept that night with Gabriel in her hospital room and in the morning were visited by relatives and their clergyman. They then took Gabriel home so he could be seen by, and photographed with, his siblings, one of whom dressed Gabriel for Mass. That evening, Gabriel was laid to rest. I don't know that there is a proper way to grieve. I do know that Rick Santorum is a very conservative guy who votes a deeply religious conscience.

He was legally right on sodomy. Politically right? Maybe too far.


TOPICS: Editorial; News/Current Events; US: Pennsylvania
KEYWORDS: gays; homosexualagenda; homsexuality; lawrencevtexas; pennsylvania; samesexmarriage; santorum; scalia; senate; supremecourt

1 posted on 07/03/2003 10:35:27 PM PDT by LdSentinal
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To: LdSentinal
SPOTREP
2 posted on 07/03/2003 10:49:38 PM PDT by LiteKeeper
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To: LdSentinal
This from the City of Brotherly Love's Newspaper.... From the city who is working hard to destroy their Boy Scouts. While Gay Love can be consentually engaged in at the privacy of people's own homes, there was no indication that marriages, insurance discounts, or tax code alterating legistation was implied.

It is ironic that the democrat party and activist legistation is pushing the party to fault lines which "socially" they might not recover. The truth will rear its head during the 2004 elections - if Republicans win big the gays, National Teacher Assoc/Nat Educ Accoc, military bashing, and states like California will have cobbled together the collective death throes.

3 posted on 07/03/2003 11:00:33 PM PDT by Jumper
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To: LdSentinal
Santorum and Scalia were indeed dead right.

On this comment though the author is incorrect:" The Supreme Court did not recognize sodomy as a fundamental right under the Due Process Clause. "

They did in fact invoke the Due Process - 'sutstantive Due Process'. Santorum was exactly correct in mentioning Griswold, it was a precedent cited by Kennedy in his opinion.

The Leftist media had no care for facts though, they just wanted to plaster Santorum as a 'bigot'.

4 posted on 07/03/2003 11:24:40 PM PDT by WOSG (We liberated Iraq. Now Let's Free Cuba, North Korea, Iran, China, Tibet, Syria, ...)
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