Meet the parents: Santorum said a mouthful about gay people, but he was tongue-tied when he came face-to-face with their families. (Politics).

Fran Kirschner, a 59-year-old Philadelphia resident and the president of the local chapter of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, says that when she heard Sen. Rick Santorum's comments comparing homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery, "I felt so much hurt and heartbreak for my daughter," a 31-year-old lesbian living in Boston.

In response, she and her husband, Allen, 71, and their longtime friends from Pennsylvania, Richard, 67, and Melina Waldo, 64, now of Haddonfield, N.J., decided they needed to discuss the topic with Santorum in person.

They didn't have any delusions about changing the senator's mind. "But I just thought if we went there and spoke to the senator as one parent to another, that it wouldn't be difficult for him to understand that we love our children just like he loves his," says Melina Waldo, who has a 31-year-old gay son. "And that the words he used and the linkages he made were deeply hurtful to our families."

Thanks to Fran Kirschner's repeated phone calls to Santorum's office, the quartet was able to schedule a 10-minute meeting with the senator in his Washington, D.C., office on May 1.

Each couple brought along a picture of their children to the meeting. The Kirschners, who have six kids, carried a family photo taken last year at a straight daughter's wedding. Allen Kirschner says he told the senator, "This is my family." Then, pointing to his lesbian daughter, he asked, "Am I supposed to tell her she can't love?"

Melina Waldo says she held up a photo of her son and a card he had given her on Mother's Day 2001, in which he thanked her for loving him unconditionally. "It's one of my most precious possessions," she said.

But both couples agree the meeting, which ended up lasting about half an hour, didn't go well. In fact, they say, Santorum wasn't interested in the pictures or cards. "He just left them on the table and barely gave them a glance," Melina Waldo says.

"I had hoped he would just sit down and listen to us and talk to us in a reasonable way, even if we were in disagreement," says Fran Kirschner.

"But he was hotheaded," Melina Waldo adds. "He just kept telling us that privacy doesn't exist in the Constitution and that he was a lawyer and that we didn't know what we were talking about."

By the end of the meeting, Santorum was agitated, red-faced, and hostile, the couples say. And when the meeting was over, they say, the senator tripped over a chair in his hurry to leave the office. (A call by The Advocate to Santorum's office was not returned.)

Still, the couples say they are glad they met with the senator. "At least we put him on notice that we are going to fight back," says Melina Waldo. "Before he opens his big antigay mouth again, I hope he thinks of us!"