Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) says the Supreme Court was wrong to knock down a Texas law that criminalized "homosexual conduct."<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickperry/6005610000/sizes/z/in/photostream/">Texas Governor Rick Perry</a>/Flickr
Dan Hirschhorn reports that former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) is continuing to hammer likely GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry on gay marriage—even after the Texas governor announced that he would support an effort to ban gay marriage nationwide:
“When someone who is a serious candidate for president is doing things that will be destructive not just for the Republican Party, but for the country, I’m going to point that out any chance I get,” Santorum told POLITICO.
Santorum is upset, or at least pretend campaign-upset, that Perry told Colorado GOPers in July that New York’s decision to legalize gay marriage was their right. “That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me.”
But next to Santorum, Perry might be the least lgbt-friendly candidate in the race. More so than former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who warns we face an existential threat from “gay and secular fascism“; more so, even, than Rep. Michele Bachmann, who once feared that the Lion King would corrupt children because its soundtrack was created by Elton John.
So what exactly has Perry done? Well, for one, he is (still) a supporter of the Texas “homosexual conduct” statute, an archaic law that made it a crime for two consenting, unrelated adults to have sex if they were of the same gender. The law was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the landmark 2002 case Lawrence v. Texas, but, despite repeated efforts, Texas has yet to formally repeal the statute. When Perry was asked about the Lawrence case in 2002, he defended the anti-sodomy statute: “I think our law is appropriate that we have on the books.” He wrote about the case in his 2011 book Fed Up, too, citing the Lawrence decision as the product of “nine oligarchs in robes” and an example of what’s wrong with our judicial system. And last spring, when Perry ran for his third full term as governor, he did so on a state GOP platform that exlicitly stated “we oppose the legalization of sodomy.”
The irony is that the Lawrence case was the impetus for Santorum’s famous comparison of gay sex to “man on dog” relations—which, in turn, was the impetus for Santorum becoming, well, “santorum.” He can try to carve out some space to the right of Rick Perry on this issue, but there’s really not that much room.
