Fridae

Gay civil rights groups in the US have called on the Republican leadership to remove Sen. Rick Santorum as chairman of the GOP Senate conference after he compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery, reports The San Francisco Chronicle.

Sen Santorum criticised homosexuality during an interview with an Associated Press reporter about a pending Supreme Court case over a Texas sodomy law, which bans consensual gay sex at home.

"All those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family," said the Pennsylvania lawmaker.

"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," Santorum said in the interview published on Monday.

After the senator's comments after they were published on Monday, the three largest US gay political groups - the Human Rights Campaign, National Stonewall Democrats and Log Cabin Republicans immediately denounced his statements.

'It is stunning, stunning in its insensitivity," said David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign. "Putting homosexuality on the same moral plane as incest is repulsive."

On Tuesday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) called on the senator to step down as chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, the third-highest post in the GOP leadership.

Santorum responded with a brief statement on Tuesday, emphasising that his comments "were specific to the right to privacy and the broader implications of a ruling on other state privacy laws." The remarks, he added, were not "a statement on individual lifestyles."

He did not address the DSCC's call for his resignation, nor did he apologise for his published statements. Instead he defended his statements during an interview with Fox News on Tuesday saying: "This is a legitimate public policy discussion. This is what the state of Texas argued in their brief. These are not ridiculous comments."

The Associated Press released unedited transcripts of its reporter's April 7 interview with Santorum. "In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality," Mr. Santorum said then. "That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

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The White House has also been noticeably silent on the issue, spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters at a briefing Tuesday that he did not know the "context" of the comments and that he had not discussed the matter with President Bush.

Howard Dean, the former Governor of Vermont and a leading Democratic presidential candidate said in a written statement: "The silence with which President Bush and the Republican Party leadership have greeted Sen. Santorum's remarks is deafening."

Some said the comments could be as ruinous as Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's remarks last December praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist campaign for the presidency at the latter's 100th birthday party. Bush quickly denounced those remarks that were considered racially insensitive, shortly after, Lott was forced to resign as Republican Senate leader.

"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 Sen. Lott," said David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay advocacy organisation. "We would ask that the leadership reconsider his standing within the conference leadership."

"If we're going to condemn someone like Trent Lott for racial comments, then we certainly should be able to come out with disgust against Santorum," said John Partain, president of the Log Cabin Republicans of Philadelphia, a gay Republican group.

Meanwhile, conservative Christian groups have defended the senator's comments. Family Research Council President Ken Connor said: "If the justices overturn the Texas law and hold sodomy to be a constitutional right on the grounds of privacy, then laws against bigamy, incest, polygamy, adultery and other purely 'private' sexual relationships must also be unconstitutional."

Connor asserted, "the law has historically respected and protected the marital union and has distinguished it from acts outside that union, such as fornication, adultery and sodomy."