It seems like only yesterday, but it was more than eight years ago that Rick Santorum unburdened himself of the view that “in every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.”

Wikipedia reminds us that the AP reporter who recorded these remarks interrupted Santorum to comment, “I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog’ with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.” (I don’t understand that sentiment at all. Who better to discuss Man on Dog with than a member of the world’s greatest deliberative body?)

An uproar ensued. The Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, came to the defense of the Distinguished Frothy Mixture from Pennsylvania: “Rick is a consistent voice for inclusion and compassion in the Republican Party and in the Senate, and to suggest otherwise is just politics.” The president agreed, calling Santorum an “inclusive man.”

Anyway, I was reminded of all this because today’s Le Monde reports that a member of the National Assembly from the right wing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party produced a Santorumesque reflection yesterday during a parliamentary hearing on a bill to legalize gay marriage. “And why not marriages with animals?” wondered Brigitte Barèges. “Or polygamy?”

According to the article, a fellow UMP deputy who was present “firmly” condemned these “shameful, ignoble” words. And the leader of the parliamentary UMP, Jean-François Copé called them “unacceptable” and said they “obviously in no way reflect any position of the UMP.” Autres pays, autre mœurs. (Copé then returned to his usual activity of pandering to the far right on immigration.)

In a country where cultural capital counts for so much, clearly the correct response to a controversy like this would have been to echo John McCain’s 2003 reaction to Santorum’s man-on-dog outburst: “I think that he may have been inartful in the way that he described it.”

To illustrate what an artful description of bestiality would have sounded like, McCain then launched into a graceful impromptu recitation of Yeats’s Leda and the Swan before an audience of stunned reporters:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

“You see, it’s a slippery slope,” McCain added.