Why it's still ok to be antigay: the White House's unqualified support for Sen. Rick Santorum after his antigay rant in April is just one more sign of what gay activists are up against in wooing the GOP. (Politics).

Sen. Rick Santorum was on a roll. After endorsing Texas's antigay sodomy law and comparing homosexuality to incest and polygamy, the Pennsylvania Republican said, "That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

The comments surprised many Americans and even "freaked out" the Associated Press reporter who was interviewing the senator. "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," the reporter said.

Yet the combination of outrage and puzzlement that greeted Santorum's bizarre rant didn't seem to freak out Republican Party leaders. In fact, when Democrats demanded that Santorum be stripped of his post as the GOP's convention chairman, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said President George W. Bush felt Santorum was "an inclusive man." Senate majority leader Bill Frist described him as a "voice for inclusion and compassion." Pennsylvania's senior senator, Arlen Specter, said his colleague was "not a bigot" and implied that Santorum's critics were "cannibals." And Marc Racicot, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said nothing.

"It's hard to say what's worse--Santorum's comments or the total denial about them in the party," says Steve Glassman, the openly gay cochair of the Statewide Pennsylvania Rights Coalition.

The senator's diatribe--and the defense of it--not only exposed the GOP's continued coddling of its religious right base. It also laid bare the lack of influence gay activists have within a party that will control the White House and Congress for at least the next two years.

"It comes down to a numbers game," says Hastings Wyman, publisher of Southern Political Report, a nonpartisan biweekly newsletter. "Sure, the GOP would rather not offend gays, but the religious right is calling the shots here."

In fact, religious right activists were jubilant when Santorum articulated what they had been saying for years. Gary Bauer, a religious right leader who won 1% of the vote in the New Hampshire GOP primary in 2000, said that "while some elites may be upset by [Santorum's] comments, they're pretty much in the mainstream of where most of the country is."

Actually, polls indicate that the public is skeptical of sodomy laws. A Harris Interactive/Witeck-Combs Communications poll taken in April showed that 74% of Americans said the laws should be repealed. More than 35 states have scrapped their sodomy laws in the past 40-plus years, and 10 of those (with two others pending) and Washington, D.C., have done so since 1986, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia's sodomy law in the Bowers v. Hardwick decision.

The growing public support for gay rights and glaring acts of hostility like Santorum's undercut the GOP's effort to market itself as a moderate party and underscore its reliance on antigay activists. At a time when the party enjoys sweeping power, observers wonder whether its leaders can muster the willpower to distance themselves from antigay crusaders and whether gay activists can ever apply enough pressure to the party to make that happen.

One Washington insider determined to loosen the far right wing's grip on the GOP is Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the gay group Log Cabin Republicans since January. Guerriero, who abandoned a bid last year to become lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, was among those who called on Santorum to apologize.

"Log Cabin Republicans are entering a new chapter," says Guerriero, whose predecessor at Log Cabin, Rich Tafel, was frequently criticized as an apologist for the party's antigay leaders. "We're no longer thrilled simply about getting a meeting at the White House. We're organized enough to demand full equality. I've heard that vibration since I've been in Washington--that people in the party are taking us for granted. To earn respect, we have to start demanding it."

The other national pro-gay GOP group, the Republican Unity Coalition, which has closer ties to the Bush administration, has staked out a far less confrontational position, denouncing Santorum's views while defending his right to hold them. The "RUC believes there is a difference between being wrong and being accused of all kinds of bigotry," the group said in a prepared statement.

Charles Francis, the coalition's founder and chairman and a friend of Bush's, tells The Advocate that "there's no lack of access to the top of the party" for gay members. "I think the role of all gay people that care about civil equality is not only to speak clearly but to allow people to have different opinions while educating, educating, and educating," he says.

But Guerriero contends that Santorum needs to be held accountable. "I don't think it's defensible anymore to support sodomy laws and then to equate homosexuality with bestiality and polygamy," he says. "The time has come for a better approach to our issues."

But it isn't clear whether Guerriero's more confrontational style or Francis's more assimilationist approach will have any effect at all. "The problem the party faces is that it's not that easy to sort out the extremists from those who simply espouse strongly conservative views," says John Green, a professor of political science at Ohio's University of Akron and an expert on religion and politics. "There are a lot of people within the party who say, 'Why put up with extremism?' But the Republican Party doesn't know how to get the typical Southern Baptist or Pentecostal voter without going through leaders who are far more reactionary. The GOP would love to get the votes without getting [Jerry] Falwell and [Christian Coalition of America founder Pat] Robertson, but it's not an easy thing to pull off."

Green suggests that this politically expedient approach could hurt Republicans in the long run. "Party leaders have failed to build an effective outreach program to evangelical voters that does not depend on self-selected leaders," he says. "It's going to have a much harder time luring the next generation of voters who will want nothing to do with" radicals.

Of course, not all Republican senators side with the more conservative wing of the party. But these senators' rebuke of Santorum was timid at best. Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island denounced the comments, as did Sens. Gordon Smith of Oregon and Olympia Snowe of Maine. "It's divisive language," Chafee said tepidly, "and I don't think that's constructive."

The nonpartisan Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest and most influential gay rights group, has made it a priority to woo moderate Republicans, especially since the GOP retook the Senate in 2002. But in this case at least, HRC's efforts did not pay dividends. "The response by Senate moderates was hurt by the fact that Congress was on recess when the comments were made, and [the senators] were spread all over the country," says David Smith, HRC's communications director. "When they returned, we were pleased with what they had to say."

Specter was the one exception, Smith says. "We felt it was outrageous for him to claim Santorum is not a bigot. We have been very supportive of Specter, and we are in the process of reevaluating our relationship with him. Everything is on the table," he adds, including withholding the group's endorsement.

Even so, Smith insists that the GOP is trending toward the support of gay rights. He points out that there was even less consternation in the party when former House speaker Newt Gingrich compared homosexuality to alcoholism and former Senate majority leader Trent Lott compared it to kleptomania. "Privately the White House was very unhappy with Santorum," Smith says.

Yet President Bush never expressed his displeasure in public, and it is unlikely he will ever take on the far right, especially when it comes to issues of gay rights. While the president's top political strategist has extended an olive branch to gay Republicans, he has made repeated overtures to the party's far-right base.

"Sure, Bush is riding high in the polls right now, but the White House is clearly worried about the economy, and you never know about his political fortunes in 2004," Green says. "The White House feels it will need every vote in the reelection campaign."

As governor of Texas, Bush supported the state's sodomy statute as a "symbolic gesture of traditional values." And two of Bush's recent federal court nominees are on record in support of the laws. One of them is Alabama attorney general William H. Pryor, whose state outlaws both same-sex and opposite-sex sodomy. In a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold sodomy laws, he said that if a constitutional right that would protect homosexuality is enshrined, it "must logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia."

Bush also nominated Oregon's U.S. attorney, Michael Mosman, to serve on a federal bench. As a clerk for Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, who cast the deciding vote in Bowers v. Hardwick, Mosman wrote a series of memos favoring Georgia's sodomy law on the grounds that repealing it would lead to the legalization of prostitution and other sex crimes. Since then, Mosman has told The [Portland] Oregonian he opposes sodomy laws.

But as long as Bush stays silent on gay issues and continues to appease the far right with nominations such as Pryor's and Mosman's, it will be a long time before it's no longer OK to be antigay in the GOP.

Officials at HRC, Log Cabin, and the Republican Unity Coalition say they will remain steadfast in their efforts to educate Republican leaders on gay issues. But if Santorum and his recent comments are any indication, any ground shift will require more than a few lessons.

One of Santorum's colleagues, Rep. James Greenwood, a moderate Pennsylvania Republican, tried to explain the senator's antigay statements to The New York Times. "I suspect Rick doesn't know many gay people," he said, "and it may very well be that he never had a serious conversation with gay men and women about why they are gay."

But lawmaking has brought Santorum into close contact with gays and lesbians in Washington. Guerriero, in fact, had been in his office on several occasions to discuss legislation on issues ranging from global AIDS to taxation.

"One of the most disappointing things about this episode is that we've spent a lot of time with the senator trying to find common ground," Guerriero says. "This is how he repays us? There is a sad history of Republican leaders choosing to go down this path, and he should've known better."

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