Santorum: I've met people who are no longer gay

Rick Santorum and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow clashed over gay rights issues on her show Wednesday night, and the Republican presidential candidate offered an apology of sorts for a remark he made a dozen years ago.

If people are born gay or transgender, Santorum posited, “it leads to a whole bunch of other situations,” like sex-selective abortions, for example.


“So if you can determine whether one of your children is gay, should we pass a law saying you can’t abort a child because you found out that child’s going to be gay? You can’t abort a child because you found out that child was going to be a woman? How would you feel about a law like that?” he asked Maddow.

Asked whether believed being gay is a choice, Santorum said he has never answered the question because he does not really know the answer.

“There are people who are alive today who identified themselves as gay and lesbian and who no longer are. That’s true. I do know, I’ve met people in that case. So I guess maybe in that case, maybe they did,” he said, adding that he does “know people who have lived the gay lifestyle and no longer live it.”

“But I suspect that there’s all sorts of reasons that people end up the way they are. And I’ll sort of leave it at that,” he said.

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these things, to be honest,” he added.

Maddow challenged Santorum on that, noting that he has talked about gay rights “all the time,” recalling a 2003 interview with an Associated Press reporter in which he referred to bestiality as the potential slippery slope after the Supreme Court made consensual gay sex legal across the country.

Maddow pressed further, asking Santorum about a comment he made following the Supreme Court’s 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision that effectively struck down laws banning consensual same-sex sexual activity legal in every state. Following the decision, he t old an AP reporter that the court could also find that people have a right to any other type of acts, like “man on child, man on dog, whatever the case may be.”

Santorum said he regretted making the “flippant” comment, but he stands by the substance of his remarks, adding that the reporter was “not being particularly professional.”

“That’s not an excuse for me,” he added. “I take responsibility for what I said.”

“And you regret it,” Maddow said. “Absolutely,” Santorum replied. “It was a flippant comment that should have come out of my mouth. But the substance of what I said, which is what I’ve referred to, I stand by that. I wish I had not said it in a flippant term that I did, and I know people were offended by it, and I wish I hadn’t said it.”