Benjy Sarlin January 9, 2012, 5:23 AM

Rick Santorum, best known for his fiery opposition to gay rights, offered up a surprisingly earnest olive branch when questioned on the topic on Sunday’s GOP debate. But has he actually changed his tune at all?

“I would be a voice in speaking out for making sure that every person in America, gay or straight, is treated with respect and dignity and has the equality of opportunity,” Santorum said after asking if he’d be a “voice for gay rights” in the GOP. “That does not mean that I would agree with certain things that the gay community would like to do to change laws with respect to marriage, respect to adoption, and things like that.”

Asked as a follow up whether he would accept it if one of his children told him they were gay, he responded without hesitation.

“I would love him as much as I did the second before he said it,” Santorum said. “And I would try to do everything I can to be as good a father to him as possible.”

That vulnerable moment drew a round of applause from the audience, a pretty remarkable feat considering a gay soldier was greeted with boos at one recent Republican debate when he asked a question to the candidates.

But Santorum’s narrow description of his policy differences with the gay community understates just how far out he’s gone out of his way to opposite any advancement in their rights. After all, Santorum’s famous 2003 “man on dog” comment, which still follows him to this day every time someone Googles his name, wasn’t made while just discussing gay marriage. He was also arguing that people of the same sex shouldn’t have the right to be physically intimate in their own homes.

“We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose,” he said in the same interview. “Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the 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.”

There’s nothing to suggest Santorum has changed his tune there. In fact he’s still using anti-sodomy laws as a wedge issue, this time against his fellow Republican candidates instead of Democrats.

“[I] stood up from the very beginning back in 2003 when the Supreme Court was going to create a constitutional right to sodomy and said this is wrong we can’t do this,” Santorum said in an October interview with radical anti-gay preacher Bradlee Dean. “And so I stood up when no one else did and got hammered for it. I stood up and I continue to stand up.”

And it’s not like Santorum has de-emphasized his social conservative message this campaign. He was booed at two New Hampshire events in two days last week after condemning gay marriage and gays in the military.

“You got to separate out the policy from his personal compassion,” William Cahill, Santorum’s New Hampshire co-chair, told TPM when asked if the candidate had mellowed since his firebreathing Bush-era days. “The man is a very compassionate man, he’s a family man, he’s a very religious man. He doesn’t wear it on his sleeve, but he has compassion and a deep understanding of the human condition.”

So let’s be clear here: when Santorum says he has an honest disagreement with gays and that he’d accept his hypothetical gay son, he means he’d accept his right to live in the closet.

2012, 2012 Presidential Primaries, Rick Santorum