In honor of all the news about P Diddy’s well-attended, and well-lubed, Freak Off parties, it seems like the right time to dust off this chestnut from Details, 2003, on the subject of just what thrills, according to the Supreme Court, an American citizen can - and can not - legally enjoy. For those too young to remember, the main player here was Rick Santorum, a fundamentalist senator from Pennsylvania, famed for his homophobia, sweater vests, and weird obsession with “man-on-dog” sex. (Though not necessarily in that order.) Check it out…
I swore I would never talk about my date with Rick Santorum. It was a whirlwind affair. Not even an affair really. We were young, innocent, and very, very in love. Oh, not the way you think. I’m not talking about homosexuality, incest, man-on-dog, or worse, man-on-gay-dog-owned-by-trans-rabbinical-student. No, what I’m talking about is the magic that happened between the future lawmaker and a regular guy by the name of me.
I know it’s a cliche, but our eyes met across a crowded room. Actually a crowded men’s room. It was 30th Street Station, in Philly, around rush hour, and lots of fellows were waiting their turn at the urinals. I don’t know whose hand brushed whose, but one minute I was admiring Ronald Reagan’s pompadour on an old Newsweek cover, the next I was staring into the eyes of a clean-cut toothsome lad who looked like he’d eventually produce multiple offspring. For the briefest instant, his gaze melted into mine. And then, he said the words I’ll always remember: “It’s all right to think about committing acts which violate God’s natural laws, but the Constitution says we have no right to commit them - even in our own home.”
Be still my heart! Can a brief if anonymous encounter in a public toilet between two hetero he-man types be considered a date? Well, probably not. Especially because it never happened. But it could have, damn it!
Savor, if you will, the subtle genius that is the real mind of Rick Santorum: “If the Supreme court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then do you have the right to bigamy, to polygamy? Do you have the right to adultery…? Does that not undermine the fabric of society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution.”
Well okay then! What inspired the “Say No To Anal” lawmaker to such sophistry was the infamous Texas Sodomy Law, then up for consideration by seven men and two women who dressed for work in matching muumuus. (I don’t know what your job is, but I can’t think of anything better than popping out of bed and hopping into poly-blend tent-dresses, AKA supreme Court Robes, that match my co-workers’. Seriously! Just the thought of Clarence Thomas with nothing on below decks but an “Appeal To Heaven” thong… I mean, H-O-T spells HOT, am I right? And speaking of Clarence, just how far would he go for the kind of dough Diddy was paying brothers to hop on the man-on-man train? Aside from all those favorable rulings, did Harlan Crowe want any other little favors? Just asking!)
In the Texas sodomy case, two men were “discovered” having consensual sex by the police, who’d been summoned to the scene by a neighbor who reported a bogus complaint. The cops weren’t officially searching for sex offenders. But when they banged into the apartment and caught the guilty parties reenacting the lost Tony Curtis-Laurence Olivier love scene from Spartacus, the Lone Star lawmen knew they had a job to do. And they did it.
Just put yourself in those poor policemen’s shoes. Look the other way when you roll into somebody’s home and catch them mid-rim-job, next thing you know you’ll be letting off lust-crazed rural romantics diddling their Guernseys. Or, worse, pretending it’s okay when some tax-paying suburban couple decides to throw a swing party. Call it the Moral Domino Theory. You don’t think America will crumble when voters start swapping spouses, watching their better halves go buns-up on the rec room linoleum with strangers whose names they got from the back of Military-Industrial Monthly? (Bible of the lust-crazed cads and kittens who build the big ones for Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and the like.) Read your Book of Revelation and get back to me, buddy.
What was really shocking, back in the day, about all this Santorum weirdness, is that anybody thought it was weird. It’s not like the GOP wasn’t already trying to turn the country into a giant Sunday School before the perv-averse Pittsburgher spouted off on the living hell of man-on-canine action.
Speaking of, say what you will about about Diddy, there is no recorded footage - that we know of - of the mega-producer plying some young rapper with GHB and forcing him to fellate a Schnauzer. Then again, it’s early days….
As if the Law would stop people from diddling their Guernseys. I grew up in North Texas in the 1980s. I’ve seen things that would have scared the shit out of Wilbur Whateley. (Specifically, I had to grow up in a hellpit called Lewisville, northwest of Dallas. I used to tell a joke about the Lewisville Erotic Film Festival, consisting of 87 back-to-back showings of “Deliverance,” until a former high school classmate asked me “…so? What’s the problem?”)
A great way to start the day! Thanks Jerry, I'll carry this with me all day. Poor dogs.