Santorum’s Remarks About Gays Spur Calls for Censure

WASHINGTON —  Gay rights groups, fuming over Sen. Rick Santorum’s comparison of homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery, urged Republican leaders on Monday to consider removing the Pennsylvania lawmaker from the GOP Senate leadership.

The coalition of groups compared Santorum’s remarks to those made in December by Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi about Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist campaign for the presidency. Shortly afterward, Lott was forced to resign as GOP Senate leader.

Santorum is chairman of the GOP conference in the Senate, third in his party’s leadership.

“We’re urging the Republican leadership to condemn the remarks. They were stunning in their insensitivity, and they’re the same types of remarks that sparked outrage toward Senator Lott,” said David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay advocacy group. “We would ask that the leadership reconsider his standing within the conference leadership.”

In an interview with Associated Press, Santorum criticized homosexuality while discussing a pending Supreme Court case over a Texas sodomy law.

“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,” he said.

Santorum spokeswoman Erica Clayton Wright said the lawmaker’s comments “were specific” to the Supreme Court case.