However misguided Sen. Rick Santorum’s comments were about a Supreme Court challenge to a Texas law banning sodomy between members of the same sex, they should not have been a surprise. The senator’s views on homosexuality were well known by his political party, which nevertheless made him their new star.

Sen. Santorum of Pennsylvania is the third-ranking Republican in the Senate leadership. He opposes the removal of state bans on sodomy and recently said, “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. … It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution.” Both Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, in addition to a few other moderate Republicans, criticized the comments.

This linkage between the Texas case and polygamy, incest, etc., has infuriated some gay-rights groups, which want the senator to surrender his leadership position, and at least irritated the Republican Unity Coalition, which includes former President Gerald R. Ford and Mary Cheney, the daughter of the vice president. The coalition describes itself as a “gay-straight organization dedicated to making homosexuality a non-issue” and referred to Sen. Santorum’s comments as “false and harmful comparisons.”

That sums it up nicely. False, because incest, which often involves intimidation and abuse of children and has genetic implications for close relatives producing children, is not a victimless condition. Polygamy and bigamy similarly produce victims – subjugated women, children without clear family structures. Adultery has ceased to be illegal virtually everywhere, so is not much of an issue. Even in his dissent in the 1986 Georgia sodomy case, Bowers v. Hardwick, Justice Blackmun used as a limit the question of whether the act produced a victim: “Nothing in the record before the Court provides any justification for finding the activity forbidden [sodomy] … to be physically dangerous, either to the persons engaged in it or to others.”

Sen. Santorum said his view simply reflects the majority opinion in the Georgia ruling, but he must be aware that the controversy has more to do with how the GOP will be viewed by a nation that is changing its views about homosexuality. The party, of course, is free to hold any view it wants; it becomes harmful, however, when coupled with the belief that there is no right to privacy, a surprise to many who thought this was a point of settled law. Is he saying and does the party stand with him in the belief that the state should police the nation’s bedrooms to root out what he sees as deviant behavior?

Without a general party rejection

of the senator’s views, the controversy will likely not turn into the spectacle that Sen. Trent Lott faced after his belated endorsement of the Dixiecrat ticket. But the disconnection between the soft-sell tolerant image portrayed in campaign ads and leadership’s punitive, invasive view on regulating sexual intimacy has been revealed, and the GOP should respond.