Rick Santorum: The Harvey Milk of the Republican Primary

Maclean’s Jaime Weinman draws our attention to a most interesting piece of non-satire. It would appear that National Review Online‘s Terence P. Jeffrey is worried that Rick Santorum is a sleeper agent for teh gays:

A profoundly instructive moment on this point occurred in Saturday night’s debate when Josh McElveen of WMUR-TV asked whether it ought to be legal for same-sex couples to adopt children.

The correct answer to this is: No. It was, is, and always will be wrong for any government to hand over in an adoption the custody of a child to a homosexual couple. A government that does so violates the God-given right of the child to be raised by a mother and father…

Yet when McElveen put his question to Rick Santorum, Santorum failed to give a coherent answer. Santorum seemed to say — although his exact meaning was unclear — that although he wanted a constitutional amendment to define “marriage” as the union of one man and one woman, the question of same-sex adoptions was up to state governments to decide…

If a homophobe can’t count on Rick Santorum to Protect The Children from show tunes and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy re-runs, then who can he count on?

Ever the model of level-headedness, NRO‘s Andy McCarthy counters:

… and Terence Jeffrey is wrong. Adoption, like marriage, is not a matter the Constitution commits to federal government control. It is, like the vast run of day-to-day issues, a matter to be determined by the states. There is nothing conservative about imposing federal government mandates on matters the Constitution gives the federal government no say over.

…

If Mr. Jeffrey wants a federal adoption standard imposed, then he should be arguing for a constitutional amendment banning adoptions by gay couples…

I guess a refuation based on constitutional technicalities is better than no refutation at all. ‘Twould have been nice, though, had someone at NRO objected to the substance (such as it was) of Mr. Jeffrey’s (vapid) blog post.

Perhaps, just perhaps, offering orphans a loving and stable home is a better option than shuffling them through the system, one’s prejudices aside.