Indeed, by backing Santorum, President Bush and most other Republicans have apparently concluded that, as conservative activist Gary Bauer put it, Santorum's views reflected the American mainstream.
All this, in some ironic way, should please me. In 1998, I published a book called One Nation, After All. Based on interviews with 200 middle-class Americans from all across the country, I showed that we had become a tolerant people unwilling to make judgments, with one notable exception--the issue of homosexuality. When I hear Santorum and his allies speak, I tell myelf that perhaps they read my book carefully and came to the conclusion that there are no political costs to be paid for treating homosexuality as a moral transgression to be attacked rather than a lifestyle to be defended.
But perhaps my book is, well, not wrong--but overtaken by events. There is now considerable evidence that public opinion concerning gays has been softening in recently years:
Many factors are responsible for this, including the movement for same-sex marriage (which negates the image of gays as ultra-promiscuous) and the ubiquity of programs on television featuring marriages offered as rewards for money or sexual attraction (which perhaps reminded everyone that heterosexuals are as crudely hedonistic as anything in popular images of gay culture).
Although some attributed the crisis in the Catholic Church to the pernicious influence of homosexual priests, for many Catholics, even conservative ones, it become difficult to retain the belief that homosexuality is the most venal of sins when pedophilia and cover-up were among the competitors.
Not only has public hostility toward homosexuality softened, but Americans have also traditionally made an important distinction between positive and negative tolerance. "Don't ask me to go out of way to give support for homosexuals by allowing them to marry," many of those I interviewed would say, "but if someone wants to do something behind closed doors, that's none of my business." This distinction helps explain why, for example, Americans tend to believe that homosexuality should not be taught in school but that there is nothing wrong with homosexuals being teachers, so long as they keep their sexuality to themselves.
Such libertarianism led the conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly to say that "America does not need a sex police." It may also lead Americans who are not especially fond of homosexuality to worry that people like Santorum would, if they had the chance, criminalize conduct that does no harm to other people. His comments, after all, were not about denying gays "special privileges," but rather about making homosexual acts criminal.
If in fact the tide has turned, the Republicans who are more in tune with public sentiment than the conservatives are the two Senators from Maine--Susan Collins and Olympia Snow--who claimed that Santorum's remarks were "wrong" and "insensitive." Much the same could be said for a group called the Republican Unity Coalition, including former President Gerald R. Ford and Mary Cheney, who asked the Senator to apologize for his comments. Inherent in their position is the idea that most Americans are basically tolerant and do not want members of any group singled out for invidious treatment. However uncomfortable Americans may be about issues of sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, in their view, they will punish a party perceived as insensitive and cruel.
On social issues, Americans are, as George W. Bush recognized in the 2000 election, conservative but compassionate. Many of them, even those who love the sinner while hating the sin, do not necessarily think that the gay son of the people down the street is halfway down the road to incest. To reach past the base of the party to those people whose politics are conservative but whose instincts are inclusive, Republicans may well need to find a more capacious language than the words chosen by Senator Santorum.
