Republican presidential candidate Rick
Santorum claims that the Supreme Court's recent ruling striking down
state bans on gay marriage proves his “man on dog” warning was
correct.
In 2003, Santorum predicted that if the
high court struck down state laws criminalizing sodomy in Lawrence
v. Texas, then “you have the right to anything” including
pedophilia and “man on dog” relationships.
“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. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would
argue yes, it does ... [I]t destroys the basic unit of our society
because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy
families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's
sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable,
traditional family ... 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.”
At a Q&A at the Western
Conservative Summit in Colorado held the day last month that the
Supreme Court handed down its decision, Santorum fielded a question
that linked the ruling back to his infamous comments.
“What I say is if you have the right
to consensual sexual activity, then it opens the door to a variety of
different things,” Santorum
responded. “And this ruling did it. This ruling followed up
with what I said would happen if the Supreme Court ruled the way it
did and the Supreme Court has followed their line of reasoning that I
identified very early on that if consensual sexual activity is a
constitutional right, then we have to, it leads logically, as you saw
in the court's opinion, that all things, that all the rights come
with that.”
The decision “has certainly opened
the door for a variety of other things that are going to happen,”
he answered when asked whether the ruling would lead to polygamy.