In January 2002, early in his run for Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney told the extremist homosexual publication Bay Windows that he favored overturning laws criminalizing sodomy. (That Romney would even grant an interview to this publication is telling.) Romney's position on sodomy laws, an issue of morality as well as public health, is clearly not conservative.
Romney answered a questionnaire from Bay Windows, so this was not an off-the-cuff answer:
“19 questions for Mitt Romney” January 1, 2002
Bay Windows asked: “What is your position on each of the following issues? … Repeal of sodomy laws -- ”
Romney answered: “I don’t think government should interfere in the private lives of consenting adults.”
Does Romney consider sodomy laws to concern just what goes on in private? Does Romney also believe that the state has no interest in outlawing other “private” sexual behaviors such as prostitution, incest, bigamy, or polygamy -- if they are between “consenting adults”?
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Texas law that criminalized sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Antonin Scalia recognized in his dissent the far-reaching impact that ruling would have: “Scalia … averred that, State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of [previous ruling] Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices…. The Court has not ruled on statutes prohibiting adult incest, polygamy, adultery, prostitution, and other forms of sexual intimacy between consenting adults. Lawrence may have created a slippery slope for these laws to eventually fall.” (Wikipedia)
Scalia was right. Just months later, the Goodridge ruling in Massachusetts (which said that it was unconstitutional to ban homosexual “marriage”) cited the Lawrence sodomy ruling as precedent.
Not only is decriminalizing sodomy serious as a legal precedent, it also has public health ramifications Romney apparently wishes to ignore. It is established fact that the high-risk behavior of anal intercourse (sodomy) plays a huge role in the spread of AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases.
In Massachusetts, sodomy is still on the books as a "crime against nature":
Ch 272, Section 34: Crime against nature. Whoever commits the abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with a beast, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than twenty years.
