Florida Mom Confronts Rick Santorum Over Gay Son's Rights

During a campaign stop in Florida, Rick Santorum told a mother that her gay son doesn't have the right to adopt children.

"I'm a proud mother of a gay son graduating from Georgetown law in May," the woman said during a campaign rally in Stuart, according to a video posted by ThinkProgress. "I want to know why he can't have the same rights as you have?”

He said a child has a right to have a mother and father, inferring that lesbian and gay people don't have the right to adopt children.

"Every American child has the right, and the government should support the right, to have and know their mother and father and be raised by their mother and father,” he said, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Santorum said that while God has granted everyone some rights, the government has control over what's leftover and issues those "privileges" to people who are "healthy for society.”

“There are certain things that government does that gives people privileges in order to promote activity that are healthy for society and are best for society," he said, according to the Post. "And those things we promote would give people advantages or benefits, government benefits because we think that is healthy activity.”

Florida has a complicated history with same-sex adoption. A same-sex adoption ban had been in place since 1977 after singer Anita Bryant's campaign against it. Then it was successfully challenged in a Florida court, and later upheld on appeal, by two men who were finally allowed to adopt their two foster children in 2011.

Santorum has said that he hopes to outlaw same-sex adoption nationwide by amending the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, which he says would make it a moot issue. He's also said that having an absent father in prison would be a better option for a child than being raised by two mothers, claiming to cite a researcher's conclusions on the question.

"He found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children's lives," Santorum told voters earlier this month, according to the Los Angeles Times.

If a same-sex couple were to raise a child, he said they would be "robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to. You may rationalize that that isn't true, but in your own life and in your own heart, you know it's true."

Watch the Florida mom's question to Santorum below:

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