Ralph R. Reiland
Saturday, May 3, 2003

I bring up Utah because Owen Allred is the 89-year-old patriarch of the United Apostolic Brethen, a pro-polygamy sect in Utah, one of the state's largest. Last week, Mr. Allred told the Philadelphia Daily News that Rick Santorum's lumping of buggery with plural marriage made him "so mad I want to swear."

Santorum stuck his foot in his mouth, says Allred, while commenting on Lawrence v. Texas during an interview with the Associated Press.

The case, now pending before the Supreme Court, involves the sodomy convictions of two men after the Houston police, responding to a disgruntled neighbor's deliberately false report of an armed intruder in the apartment of John Lawrence, entered and stumbled upon Mr. Lawrence doing something consensual but regionally illegal with Tyron Garner.

"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," said Santorum. "You have the right to anything."

Well, the "anything" in Mr. Allred's life, at 89, is eight wives, a religious tradition of multi-wifery, he explains, that traces its roots all the way back to Moses, Jacob and Abraham.

Still, Santorum might be right on this one. Who'd want eight wives at the mall, all simultaneously running up the Kaufmann's charge? Nonetheless, says Allred, by sticking polygamy in the same boat as incest and bigamy, Santorum is nothing less than "an insult to Christianity."

Slippery Slope

In any case, what Santorum is arguing is that things will snowball out of control if the Supreme Court flashes a green light to "the right to anything," to "the right to privacy," to the idea that some private and consensual behaviors other than the missionary position, man on top, might be permissible as long as we do them privately and consensually:

"Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the U.S. Constitution, this right that was created in Griswold – Griswold was the contraception case – and abortion."

It was in Griswold v. Connecticut that the U.S. Supreme Court, on June 7, 1965, struck down state laws that had made the use of birth control by married couples illegal and set the precedent that privacy, though not mentioned specifically in the Constitution, was an "unenumerated right."

Seven years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court granted unmarried couples access to contraception, and a year later, in Roe v. Wade, the court recognized a woman's right to choose abortion.

The problem, claims Santorum, is that this expansion of freedom and privacy will destroy the family:

"The further you extend it out, the more you – this freedom actually interferes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it 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."

And that family, that marriage, explains Santorum, is "one thing." It's monogamous, and not gay, and not "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

And the goal is "one thing" – children: "Society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children."

Now, pull any of those pieces out, says Santorum, and the whole thing comes crashing down. Maybe I'm slow, but I can't see how any of these freedoms, how pulling off the sex cops, is going to tear apart the fabric of my family or kill my marriage. What, I'm going to leave my wife if 3 out of 100 houses in my borough contain lesbian couples?

And "man on dog"? How many, 1 out of 10,000 neighbors, and that one guy running off with his German Shepherd, is going to cause my marriage to collapse?

Given the Santorum paradigm that says "society is based on one thing," i.e., breeding, that seems to put lesbians, gays and non-fertile heterosexuals on the back shelf, somewhat superfluous to the real business of society, people who really don't have a right to love or privacy or intimacy.

Explains Santorum: "I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations?"

No, Rick, the question is, why do you think it's any of your business? Why do you think that overdosing on sanctimony, arrogance, prudery and bigotry is the definition of morality?

Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enetrprise at Robert Morris University and a Pittsburgh restaurateur. E-mail: rrreiland@aol.com

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