Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.)<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/5438148298/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr
Just in case you thought he’d had a change of heart, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum went on Minnesota rap-core evangelist Bradlee Dean’s radio show on Saturday to double down on his belief that states should be able to make anal and oral sex illegal:
Santorum pointed to the landmark case, Lawrence v. Texas, where the U.S. Supreme Court overturned sodomy laws that were used to imprison gays and lesbians.
“And I stood up from the very beginning back in 2003 when the Supreme Court was going create a constitutional right to sodomy and said this is wrong we can’t do this,” Santorum said. “And so I stood up when no one else did and got hammered for it. I stood up and I continue to stand up.”
You know the rest. Asked to defend his comments back in 2003, Santorum went a step further, arguing that allowing two men to have sex would be akin to “man on dog.” In response, sex columnist Dan Savage held a contest to come up with an alternative definition for Santorum, and redefined it as—NSFW!—”the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.” As MoJo‘s Stephanie Mencimer has chronicled, the alternative definition has became a serious problem for the candidate because it’s the first thing that comes up when you Google his name. (The second result is a Wikipedia entry about Savage’s “Santorum” campaign.)
But what’s really interesting here is the venue: When last we heard from Dean, he was suing Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, and the American Independent News Network for $50 million for quoting him, with some caveats, suggesting that the execution of gays was “moral.” (Dean has explicitly condemned the execution of gays, but has, like Santorum, called for sodomy to be outlawed and gays to be banned from public office.) The crux of the lawsuit was that Dean believed liberal media outlets were using him as a proxy to assassinate Rep. Michele Bachmann’s character, because Bachmann has raised money for Dean and praised (and prayed for) his ministry. He also was upset that Maddow made fun of his name. So has Dean given up on Bachmann? If the polls are any indication, he wouldn’t be the only one.
