My NRO piece today on Senator Rick Santorum speaks to what I consider to be the main issue–the outrageous attempts by the Democrats and their allies at the New York Time’s to distort and misrepresent senator Santorum’s remarks, so as to destroy him. Let me also speak now to Andrew Sullivan’s extended remarks on Santorum.

On the one hand, I can understand Andrew Sullivan’s profound objections to Senator Santorum’s remarks. Senator Santorum favors sodomy laws, and that understandably calls forth strong objections from Sullivan. I myself disagree with Senator Santorum on the question of sodomy laws, and would like to see these laws abolished. Nonetheless, I find Sullivan’s parsing of Santorum’s remarks strained and unpersuasive.

As I argue in my NRO piece today on Santorum, the senator has put forward a slippery slope argument, and done so in a way that is broadly consistent with traditional Catholic views on sexuality. Since Santorum is a politician, and not a pundit, and was speaking relatively freely in an interview, he has not chosen his words with great precision. Sullivan strives mightily to transform Santorum’s interview into something it was never meant to be–a program for enacting a vast new series of regulations on heterosexual sex. I’ll believe Sullivan’s claim when I see Santorum propose such a program, not when I see Sullivan try to tease it out of some off-hand remarks in an interview. In the meantime, what needs emphasis is the gross misrepresentation by the Democrats, and their allies in the press, of senator Santorum’s remarks.