The debate continues to rage about Senator Rick Santorum’s remarks in an Associated Press interview in late April. Yet of everything that has been written and said, no one has analyzed the specifics of Santorum’s statement. Rather, it is simply being interpreted, correctly no doubt, as meaning he is anti-gay. People who like gays and support gay rights are condemning him across the board and people who hate gays and oppose gay rights are giving him equally unqualified support.

While Santorum has not apologized or backed away from his words, he and some of his apologists have said his remarks were misinterpreted. I maintain that they weren’t misinterpreted, they weren’t interpreted at all, an oversight I would like to correct.

First, here is what Santorum said:

"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,”

Rhetorically, what Santorum tries to do in his statement is associate “consensual (gay) sex” with four other words he assumes most people will think are really bad, but is he making a fair, apples-to-apples comparison? No, he’s not.

Santorum was talking about a pending Supreme Court case regarding a Texas law that prohibits homosexual sex acts. Laws like the one in Texas, known generally as sodomy statutes, were once common. Most states have repealed them, in whole or in part. Texas decriminalized heterosexual sodomy in 1974. In addition to Texas; Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma have laws against homosexual sodomy only. Nine states (Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia) still ban heterosexual sodomy too.

As you can imagine, these laws are seldom enforced. The Texas case itself hinges on some pretty weird facts. Police responding to a false report about an armed intruder interrupted two men having sex, arrested them, and charged them with violation of the state’s sodomy law.

In 1986, the Supreme Court decided Bowers v. Hardwick, a case with similar facts that challenged a Georgia sodomy law. The Court upheld the Georgia law and Justice White, delivering the opinion, wrote, “respondent would have us announce [a] fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy. This we are quite unwilling to do.” The dissent, authored by Justice Blackmun and joined by Justices Brennan, Marshall and Stevens, argued that the case was not about “a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy” but instead was about “the fundamental interest all individuals have in controlling the nature of their intimate associations with others.” The present case will revisit those issues.

While most people understand the term “sodomy” to mean anal intercourse, most sodomy laws also include cunnilingus and fellatio in the description of prohibited acts. Yes oral sex, even within the sanctity of marriage, is a crime in Alabama. Go figure.

Santorum argues that he merely was stating a reasonable opinion about the very issue the Court is considering, which is whether or not states have the right to make laws regarding private, consensual sex acts between adults. Do his other examples support that point? They do not.

Let’s consider bigamy and polygamy. These are not sex acts, they are legal (or illegal) states involving marriage. Bigamy is not defined as sex with two partners, it is simultaneous marriage to two partners. Polygamy is the same, but with more than two partners. Because marriage is a relationship sanctioned by the state and through which the state grants the parties certain legal rights, it is appropriate that the state make laws regulating what kinds of relationships are recognized as marriages and what kinds are not. The right of the states to prohibit bigamy or polygamy might reasonably be used to support the right of the states to prohibit gay marriage, but it has nothing to do with gay sex. There are no laws anywhere, of which I am aware, that prohibit consenting adults from engaging in multiple partner sex.

On to incest. Most people use the term “incest” to refer to various kinds of intra-family sexual abuse of children. In such cases, it is the sexual abuse of a child that is criminal. The fact that the abuse is perpetrated by an adult family member makes it more disgusting and may make it more heinous in the eyes of the law, leading to a more severe penalty. However, since child sexual exploitation of any kind is hardly “adult consensual sex,” how can “incest” fit into Santorum’s example?

What about sexual contact between consenting adult members of the same family? Isn’t that incest too? Sure, but is it against the law? I know of no such laws. As with bigamy and polygamy, there are laws against the marriage of close family members, usually down to and including second cousins, but not against related adults merely having sex with each other. There are certainly strong societal taboos against it, there’s a major “ick” factor, but I don’t know of anyone ever being arrested for it. (I stand corrected.)

Adultery is pretty much the same thing. “Adultery” is defined as sex by a married individual outside of the marriage. The crime, where it has been criminalized, is the breach of the marriage contract, not a specific sexual act. In fact, although they all involve sex, none of Santorum’s examples is a sexual act per se, so his whole example falls apart on that point alone.

Adultery, though, is a perfect capper for Santorum’s unholy quartet because while not widely recognized as a crime, it is widely recognized as a sin and not regarded as a good thing even by most of the people who do it.

Santorum’s concluding words, “you have the right to anything,” while overbroad in any legal sense, complete his rhetorical trick. In Santorum’s mind, consensual gay sex is the opening wedge, to be followed quickly by the horrors of bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery, which opens the flood gates to “anything,” which presumably includes sexual deviance as yet unimagined.

While it should be obvious to everyone by now that sodomy laws have always been a proxy for prosecuting homosexuality, Santorum tries to make a distinction between being anti-sodomy (he is) and being anti-gay (he’s not). It is this disingenuousness (or, if you prefer, blatant dishonesty), as much as anything, that is so offensive about Santorum’s statement. Haters like Santorum and the people who support him think they can make their hate clean and acceptable by cloaking it in legalisms. Santorum’s statement is an attempt at a kind of verbal slight of hand, trying to make things appear equal or equivalent that actually have no relationship to each other. The Supreme Court would never fall for such a cheap trick, but Santorum hopes millions of voters will.

Responsible political leaders owe it to the people they serve not to deliberately confuse "crime" and "sin," assuming, of course, that they think the secular democracy we all want for Iraq is also desirable here in the USA.