Republican sexual dysfunction

Before I go further, let's make something clear. I'm a Republican. I voted for Bush. I believe in free-markets, small government, personal responsibility and making sure the world's tyrants see U.S. Marines in their nightmares. I am not one of the "liberal academics" that pundits would have you believe are teaching their students to smoke banana peels as a prelude to socialist revolution. That said, this week's column is directed at my own party and the attitude its officials are taking toward sex and related matters.\nBack in April, Sen. Rick Santorum, R.-Pa., stirred some hornets when he equated gay sex with bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery in an interview with The Associated Press. However, in their rush to stamp "bigot" on his forehead, the press and the Democrats missed the really sinister part of the interview. Explaining an article in which he blamed liberalism for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Santorum said, "(The problem within the Church) goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it's in the privacy of your own home, this 'right to privacy,' then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it's private, as long as it's consensual, then don't be surprised what you get."\nFeel a cold shiver go down your spine? Santorum's comments are a riff in an eerie drumbeat coming from the Republican right flank. And more GOP officials are dancing to the tune. Santorum won a Triple Crown of support from the party leadership: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (AP, April 29), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 23) and President Bush (Washington Post, April 26). Last year, Justice Secretary John Ashcroft spent $7,750 in his compulsion to cover up an aluminum booby (London Daily Telegraph, Jan. 29). And recently, Rep. Patrick Toomey's, R-Pa., attempt to prevent the National Institutes of Health from funding research on sexual behavior, including the Kinsey Institute's study on sexual risk-taking, failed by only two votes (IDS, July 14). Next, the officials will order that all table legs must be covered. \nThis Puritanism arises less out of ideological conviction than a "devil's bargain" for electoral support. The party's ideology dictates that "Ours is the party of liberty, the party of equality of opportunity for all and favoritism for none" (preamble, Rules of the Republican Party). \nIndeed, senators Lincoln Chafee, Susan Collins, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Gordon Smith and Olympia Snowe, as well as the Republican Unity Coalition and the Log Cabin Republicans, went on record against Santorum's position (Washington Post, April 26; AP, April 29). However, electoral number crunchers consider the religious right indispensable. A poll by Quinnipiac University found that "43 percent of those polled -- and 61 percent of those who said they attend religious services every week or almost every week -- thought religion should have more influence (on politics and public policy)" (Hartford Courant, June 13). And since they like belching fire and brimstone terms like "sodomites" and "fornication," the rest of us tolerate it to win elections. What else can we do?\nGeorge Orwell wrote of Big Brother's sexual policy in "1984," saying, "Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it ... The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party." \nWe're the party of individual liberty, not Big Brother. Let the religious right vote for the Democrats.