Viewpoint Column
By RICH SHUMATE
Creative Loafing Atlanta/April 2003

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum was right.

Not when he equated sex between consenting gay adults with incest and polygamy, which was gratuitous prattle both vicious and silly. Not when he offered the bizarre explanation that he doesn’t have anything against gay people; he just wants to make them criminals if they have sex. (Gee, mighty big of you, Rick.)

Rather, the Pennsylvania Republican, in his recent notorious Associated Press interview, correctly forecast that if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Texas’ sodomy law in a pending case, legislators will find it harder to regulate private consensual sexual conduct behind closed doors.

But this is not, as Santorum suggested, a bad thing. It’s a good thing. More to the point, it’s a conservative thing.

Consider the following quote: “We do not seek to lead anyone’s life for him. We seek only to secure his rights and to guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed.”

Who uttered such unbridled common sense? No, not Hillary Clinton. Not Barney Frank. And certainly not Bill Bennett (although I suspect he has newfound appreciation for the sentiment after his recent gambling dust-up.)

The quote comes from the late Barry Goldwater, the father of modern American conservatism, in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention.

Santorum and other GOP social purists ignore the bedrock upon which Goldwater conservatism was built: keeping government the hell out of people’s private business. Regrettably, toward the end of Goldwater’s life, people of Santorum’s ilk were trying to strip his name from GOP headquarters in his home state of Arizona because he had the temerity to suggest gay people deserved to be treated as human beings.

“You don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that’s what brings me into it,” Goldwater said in 1994, while campaigning for a federal law to ban job discrimination based on sexual identity.

Goldwater held a conservative conviction, common in his native West, that the Constitution champions the freedoms of individuals and protects people from government intrusion — that a man’s home is his castle, what he earns from an honest day’s work belongs to him and what goes on behind closed doors is his own damn business.

The political left thwarts this ideal when it uses confiscatory taxes and intrusive regulation to redistribute wealth in pursuit of a socialist utopia. Santorum and the social purists similarly frustrate true conservatism when they use criminal law to try to resurrect Victorian England.

Santorum’s single most offensive comment in his AP interview was that he disagreed with the idea “that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individual’s wants and passions.”

“There are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire,” he said. Uh, senator, those “consequences” are known as “freedom,” which conservatives are supposed to hold in great favor.

Of late, we’ve seen few better illustrations of the slippery slope of intruding into individual liberty than the revelations that Bennett, the former Cabinet secretary turned virtues czar, was feeding millions into slot machines.

To his credit, Bennett the high roller didn’t inveigh against gambling while he was in holy-roller mode. He didn’t believe gambling was wrong, so he didn’t condemn it. He was, in essence, fighting only for virtues conforming to his own behavior (which makes it a whole lot easier to be virtuous). But in the process, he showed how dictating virtue and morality, as the Shiite Republicans so love to do, is a highly subjective pursuit.

Indulging such subjective impulses creates the very tyranny our Constitution was written to prevent: minorities forced to bow before the capricious will of majorities. It also creates illogical double standards. For instance, can we really say legalized gambling is less damaging to our society than two men or two women having sex with each other in private? Let’s ask the children of a compulsive gambler who lost this week’s food money on a bad roll of the dice.

This is not to say religious groups, individuals or even government officials shouldn’t campaign against activities they think ought to be discouraged in America. We should not be a society free of values. But there is a world of difference between discouraging something and making it a crime, particularly when the behavior is between consenting adults and doesn’t harm anyone else.

Absent a compelling state interest, a conservative interpretation of the Constitution demands we allow maximum personal freedom, even if the majority finds that freedom offensive.

Santorum has the right to disapprove of homosexuality and opine against it, but how in the world is consensual sex between two gay Texans inside their home a threat to him or anybody else? If the police hadn’t barged in and arrested them, we wouldn’t even know about it.

Santorum and other busybody politicians who run around calling themselves conservatives, but actually advocate government intrusion into our personal freedoms, would do well to stop and ask themselves this question:

What would Barry do?