November 15, 2006

Santorum's slippery slope

Posted by: Chris

The new guidelines on sexuality issued today by the U.S. Catholic bishops echo back to the memorable warning cry we received some moons ago from one of their proudest parishioners: Rick Santorum, the conservative Catholic senator run out of office by Pennsylvania voters last week. Remember what Santorum said in April 2003, just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the nation's sodomy laws?:

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.

That slippery slope, Santorum argued, could take us to some pretty bizarre places:

That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality…

(The AP reporter's reaction, by the way, was priceless: "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about 'man on dog' with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.")

Lost in the hoopla about Santorum's grotesque analogy was the real gist of what he was saying.  Guarantee people a right to engage in private consensual sex, he argued, and you're headed down a "slippery slope."

The far more likely scenario, actually, was that Santorum's slippery slope would head in the opposite direction. Legalizing sodomy hasn't led to condoning beastiality. But if Santorum and his allies in the Catholic Church hierarchy had their way, society would regulate all sorts of other private, consensual conduct: sodomy, including heterosexual oral and anal sex, sex outside of marriage and contraception.

Today's new guidelines from the Catholic bishop underscore that radically reactionary agenda. In the same breath the bishops condemn gay sex, they remind heterosexual married couples that artificial contraception is contrary to church teaching as well:

The contraception document, "Married Love and the Gift of Life," … strongly supports natural family planning, saying it "enables couples to cooperate with the body as God designed it," adding that contraception introduces "a false note" that disturbs marital intimacy and contributes to a decline in society's respect for marriage and for life.

The bishops make no distinction between the sins of gay sex and hetero use of contraception, and that's the real slippery slope here. In the real world, U.S. Catholics use contraception at about the same rate (96%) as non-Catholics, and they should understand that Santorum and his ilk would just as soon ban "the pill" as they would sodomy. In his famous "man on dog" interview, Santorum in fact decried how the slippery slope to "man on dog" began with the 1965 Griswold decision, when the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that prohibited the sale of contraception.

Of course there's no real threat of news laws criminalizing premarital sex and contraception, but if straight Americans could imagine that scenario, maybe they'd be less likely to support the Catholic Church allies who focus their sexual prudery instead on us low-hanging fruit.

Tags: gay Catholic, Santorum, U.S. bishops