Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) is under fire. According to the transcript of the now infamous interview he gave to AP reporter Lara Jakes Jordan this week, Santorum believes that regulating consensual sex between adults is a compelling government interest, while protecting the privacy of these same adults is not.
“[I]f 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. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. 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 that was created, it was created in Griswold–Griswold was the contraceptive case–and abortion. And now we’re just extending it out.
Brilliant. The Griswold case Santorum thinks is a slippery slope to moral anarchy actually recognized as basic a freedom as a woman’s right to use birth control. In 1965, the US Supreme Court upheld the unenumerated right of a married couple to use contraception, availing itself of the Ninth Amendment in rendering its holding. The Griswold case was one of the rare times the Court has interpreted the Ninth Amendment the way it ought to be interpreted –as a check on government power and a means of protecting individual rights not specifically spelt out in constitution, but still a provable aspect of an individual’s right to his life. Santorum is not just railing against sexual practices he takes issue with, he’s railing against individual rights.
In the same interview, Santorum digs himself deeper:
SANTORUM: “Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. 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. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality. . . [interrupted]
AP: I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about “man on dog” with a United States senator; it’s sort of freaking me out.
SANTORUM: And that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we’re seeing it in our society.
Santorum’s comments sort of freak me out too, but for a different reason. Santorum attacks the freedom of all consenting adults to control their capacity for sex, perhaps our most important and private capacity.
Judging by his statements, Santorum seems to think the moral purpose of one’s existence is not the pursuit of one’s happiness, defined by one’s own judgment and achieved through one’s voluntary relationships with others. Instead, the purpose of one’s existence and the existence of all of society is to simply breed and raise children–think Family
