NY Times reports: "Four parents of gay children had a fiery private exchange tonight with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. The meeting did not go well, and Mr. Santorum, who has infuriated gays by likening homosexuality to incest and bigamy, left in a hurry, tripping over a chair, the parents said. 'What we tried to do in this meeting was reach him on a human level, and we found no humanity there,' said Melina Waldo, a former constituent of Mr. Santorum who lives in Haddonfield, N.J. She said he was 'condescending, belligerent, argumentative and arrogant.'"

A Buzzflash News Analysis: "With all the well-deserved hoopla surrounding Sen. Rick Santorum's comments to the Associated Press linking homosexuality with bigamy, incest and even beastiality (prompting the AP reporter to state: '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') BuzzFlash decided to take a look back at an article Santorum wrote last year that offers some 'insight' into his recent comments. Writing for Catholic Online in July 2002, Santorum blamed the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church on 'cultural liberalism' and called for 'a new evangelization of America.'"

Ralph Neas writes: "Sen. Rick Santorum's (R-Pa.) remarks comparing the protection of Americans' privacy in their own homes to protecting bigamy and incest came as a disappointment, but, sadly, not as a surprise. Santorum's record demonstrates a history of hostility toward equal rights for all Americans, and that hostility is reflected in the attitudes of the Republican party leaders and many of the judicial nominees of Resident Bush... Since 2001, Santorum, with the resident's blessing, has worked to include language specifically authorizing discrimination into a piece of so-called 'faith-based' legislation. Santorum previously admitted that he wanted to allow religious organizations to be able to take public funds but still discriminate against gay people. Fortunately, despite Santorum's position as third-highest ranking Republican in the Senate Leadership, he was forced to remove his divisive provisions from the final version passed in the Senate."

"The White House said GOP Sen. Rick Santorum is doing a good job as party leader and is 'an inclusive man,' despite his controversial remarks on homosexuality. The resident has confidence in the senator and believes he's doing a good job as senator' and in his No. 3 Senate GOP leadership post, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Friday... Santorum compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery. He also said the right to privacy does not exist in the Constitution... 'When it comes to legal matters, ... it's a question of different groups, homosexual groups, gay groups should not have special rights or special privileges,' [Fleischer] said. His statement about Bush's view of Santorum brought criticism from the Human Rights Campaign, a lesbian and gay advocacy organization. 'If this is how the president defines inclusion, then it clearly calls into question the depth of compassion in his conservatism,' said executive director Elizabeth Birch."

Joe Conason writes: "The reaction to Rick Santorum's denunciation of gays in particular and sexual privacy in general tells us something we already should have known: Most Republicans will sell out their libertarian principles to placate the religious right -- and say nothing when theocratic radicals, masquerading as 'conservatives,' seek to impose fundamentalist morality as state policy. Too few will stand up, as did the late Barry Goldwater long ago, to challenge the theocrats and their threats. Those threats intensify whenever the Republican leadership makes the slightest gesture of inclusion toward gays, as RNC chairman Marc Racicot learned recently. For the sin of meeting with members of the Human Rights Campaign, the Family Research Council's president Kenneth Conner warned Racicot that he risked forfeiting the party's 'pro-family ... grassroots voter base.'"

NY Times reports: "A Republican group whose officials include former President Gerald R. Ford and Mary Cheney, the daughter of the vice president, demanded today that Senator Rick Santorum apologize to gays for his remarks equating homosexuality with bigamy and incest. It was the latest sign of the storm over Mr. Santorum's comments. The group spoke out a day after Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Senate majority leader, rose to Mr. Santorum's defense. 'Rick is a consistent voice for inclusion and compassion in the Republican Party and in the Senate,' Dr. Frist said in a statement issued late Tuesday night, 'and to suggest otherwise is just politics.'" Yes, Bill Frist the Cat Killer knows all about Compassion -- just like George Bush the Frog Killer. (Frist deviously and maliciously adopted cats from the Humane Society that he used for medical research. Bush's childhood friend said that Bush enjoyed blowing-up frogs. Enter keywords: "frist cat kill", " bush frogs blow-up" in Google.)

From Yahoo News: "Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean on Wednesday called for Republican Sen. Rick Santorum to resign his leadership post after the lawmaker compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery. 'Gay-bashing is not a legitimate public policy discussion; it is immoral. Rick Santorum's failure to recognize that attacking people because of who they are is morally wrong makes him unfit for a leadership position in the United States Senate,' Dean said in a statement. Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania Wednesday, Santorum defended his comments... 'To suggest that my comments, which are the law of the land and were the reason the Supreme Court decided the case in 1986, are somehow intolerant, I would just argue that it is not,' Santorum said. The House Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, said in a statement that Santorum's 'refusal to apologize demonstrates that he does not understand how wrong his comments are.'"

AP reports: "The Senate Democrats' political organization on Tuesday called for Republican Sen. Rick Santorum to resign his leadership position after the lawmaker compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery... The DSCC called Santorum's remarks 'divisive, hurtful and reckless' and said they 'are completely out of bounds for someone who is supposed to be a leader in the United States Senate.' Separately, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry issued a statement criticizing Santorum's comments and assailing the White House for remaining silent 'while their chief lieutenants make divisive and hurtful comments that have no place in our politics.' 'Every day in our country, gay and lesbian Americans get up, go to work, pay their taxes, support their families and contribute to the nation they love. These comments take us backwards in America," said the Masschusetts senator.'"

AP reports: "Gay-rights groups, fuming over Sen. Rick Santorum's comparison of homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery, urged Republican leaders Monday to consider removing the Pennsylvania lawmaker from the GOP Senate leadership. A coalition of groups in Washington and Pennsylvania compared Santorum's remarks to those last December by former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott about Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist campaign for the presidency. Shortly afterward, Lott was forced to resign as Republican Senate leader... In an interview with The Associated Press, Santorum criticized homosexuality while discussing a pending Supreme Court case over a Texas sodomy law. 'If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) 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. You have the right to anything.'"