But he let the issue define him in 2003, when he told an AP reporter that the definition of marriage should remain traditional and that “not to pick on homosexuality - it's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.” Santorum made his name battling gay rights. "I don't think that's a federal issue," he said when asked in South Carolina, quickly taking the next reporter’s question. Rick Santorum is happy to talk about gay marriage. If there’s a gay story in the news, there’s a reporter to ask him about. Then there are the questions from the press, which won’t stop. And Google has ignored Santorum's pleas to reclaim his search results. Gay activists are now working on turning to his first name into a verb.
His last name has been redefined as a crude bit of scatology, and turned into a joke on Google.
In South Carolina, he was the target of two protests, one of which left him (for the second time) covered in glitter. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, he left "homosexual marriage" out of his stump speech (at least explicitly – the “family” part of “Faith, Family, and Freedom” invokes Santorum’s emphasis on the traditional nuclear family), but still faced a tough college crowd in New Hampshire who booed him for an extended analogy between gay marriage and polygamy. But those issues found him anyway, as they seem to. The last thing he was looking for was a dustup over gay and lesbian issues. Rick Santorum rocketed out of Iowa trying to talk about the economy.