WASHINGTON—When Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., made controversial comments about homosexuality in an interview published April 22, Democrats and homosexual activists were hoping public pressure would force Republicans to remove him from the Senate leadership.

They compared his comments to statements about segregation made last year by Trent Lott, who eventually stepped aside as Senate majority leader.

And while President Bush helped to push out Lott by harshly criticizing him, this time the White House has come to Santorum's defense.

“The president 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 April 25.

“The president believes the senator is an inclusive man. And that's what he believes,” Fleischer added.

The controversy began when Santorum, who is Catholic, gave an interview with the Associated Press on April 7. The interview was regarding Lawrence v. Texas, a court case currently before the Supreme Court in which the justices might rule that state laws against sodomy violate the federal Constitution.

Santorum worried that if the Supreme Court, based on the constitutional “right to privacy,” overturns laws it will leave no legal basis for opposing other forms of sexual relationships now condemned by most of society.

“And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home,” Santorum said, “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.”

On polygamy, adultery and sodomy, he continued: “All of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.”

Homosexual organizations immediately pounced on the comments, calling for Republicans to remove Santorum as Senate Republican conference chairman.

“Sen. Santorum's remarks to the Associated Press betray a deep discrimination against an entire group of Americans that is inappropriate for a senior leader of the U.S. Senate,” said Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual activist organization in Washington, D.C. “We need leaders who will unite the country and affirm the inherent dignity, value and equality of every citizen—not just the citizens he happens to like.”

Bill Donohue, president of the New York-based Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, criticized homosexual activists who tried to compare Santorum's remarks to Lott's remarks about segregation.

“To be anti-black is to be opposed to someone on the basis of his ancestry. To be opposed to homosexuality is to be opposed to what a person does,” Donohue said. “There is a fundamental difference between race and behavior and attempts to obscure these differences are disingenuous.”

Santorum said his comments were specific to the court case and the implications of overturning a state law against sodomy on the basis of the “right to privacy.”

“In the interview, I expressed the same concern as many constitutional scholars and discussed arguments put forward by the state of Texas as well as Supreme Court justices,” Santorum said. “If such a law restricting personal conduct is held unconstitutional, so could other existing state laws.”

Santorum's comments were in the same vein as those made by the Pontifical Council For The Family in the year 2000 Vatican document on homosexual marriage, “Family, Marriage And “De Facto” Unions”

“Marriage and the family are of public interest,” said the document (No. 11); “they are the fundamental nucleus of society and the State and should be recognized and protected as such. Two or more persons may decide to live together, with or without a sexual dimension but this cohabitation is not for that reason of public interest. The public authorities can not get involved in this private choice. De facto unions are the result of private behavior and should remain on the private level.”

Ken Connor, head of the Family Research Council, said Santorum's remarks are “hardly a novel point of view.”

“Many legal scholars have made the same argument,” Connor said. “The law has historically respected and protected the marital union and has distinguished it from acts outside that union, such as fornication, adultery and sodomy.”

“To extend homosexual sodomy the same protections given to the marital union,” Connor added, “would undermine the definition of marriage and could lead to homosexual marriage.”

In the 1986 Supreme Court case Bowers v. Hardwick, a majority of the Supreme Court voiced concern that a board privacy ruling would have additional collateral impact in addition to the elimination of sodomy laws.

If the right to privacy protected voluntary sexual conduct between consenting adults, the justices wrote, “it would be difficult, except by fiat, to limit the claimed right to homosexual conduct while leaving exposed to prosecution adultery, incest and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in the home.”

Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, wrote that the high court would not overturn state sodomy laws in 1986 for that reason. “We are unwilling to start down that road,” he wrote.

Constitutional experts and Supreme Court watchers say the high court is deeply divided about the issue today and it remains unclear how the decision will come down.

Family activists are upset about the attacks on Santorum because the Supreme Court might overturn the Texas law prohibiting sodomy. And they are also worried that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts will force the Bay State to recognize same-sex marriages.

Connor called the criticism of Santorum an attempt “to intimidate defenders of marriage and silence critics of the homosexual political agenda.”

But the uproar over Santorum is expected to die down, observers say.

“The president wants to be able to dictate what the debate is about. ... In the short term, this is a major annoyance and distraction,” said Stu Rothenberg, a political analyst. But he acknowledged that the controversy would likely dissipate.

“I think that six months from now, we' be on to eight other controversies,” he said.

Timothy Carney, a political reporter for the Evans & Novak Political Report, said the controversy would continue only if Santorum backed away from his own comments.

“If Santorum is straightforward and honest about what he believes on the subject and his faith's teachings on the matter, the damage to him will be small, and the upside may be greater,” Carney said. “If he equivocates and waffles, he destroys any chances to ascend to majority leader or governor, because he will simply embolden his critics.”

But Santorum appears unlikely to backpedal from his statements. In fact, he has reaffirmed what he has said.

“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,” he said.

“I have nothing, absolutely nothing, against anyone who's homosexual,” he continued. “If that's their orientation, then I accept that, and I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So, it's not the person, it's the person's actions [that are significant].”

Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.