In April 2003, Republican senator Rick Santorum made some asinine comments in defense of laws banning gay sex. While this in itself may seem unremarkable, many people were amazed at how much detail he went into. Rick wasn't satisfied to call it 'degenerate' and move on. He really, really wanted to talk about sex, so he told the Associated Press: "If the Supreme Court says that you have a right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." Well, little did he know that two months later the Supreme Court would rule anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional... whoops!
It's not every day that a U.S. Senator squirts out a nugget like that. Public outcry was considerable, yet readers of Dan Savage's syndicated sex column Savage Love feared the ensuing scandal would soon be flushed away and forgotten. Acting on the suggestion of a reader, Savage issued this challenge:
There's no better way to memorialize the Santorum scandal than by attaching his name to a sex act that would make his big, white teeth fall out of his big, empty head. And don't doubt for a moment that Savage Love readers have that power. Savage Love readers selected "pegging" for a woman doing a man in the ass with a strap-on dildo—much to my Aunt Peggy's dismay—and "pegging" is already showing up in dictionaries of sexual slang. So, readers: Should a "Santorum" be a common or a rare sex act? Vanilla or kinky? Sweet or gruesome?
-Looks like they went with gross.