Rick Santorum.
U.S. presidential candidate Rick Santorum doubled down on his earlier statements that the Supreme Court's legalization of same-sex marriage would lead the country down a slippery slope. Reuters

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has denounced the Supreme Court's historic ruling last month that legalized gay marriage, saying "the right to consensual sexual activity" would lead to trouble for the nation. Santorum's comment echoed a notorious statement he made in 2003 before the Supreme Court threw out sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas.

Santorum's latest remarks on the Supreme Court were captured in a video taken at the Western Conservative Summit in Colorado and posted Tuesday by state Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt as part of his "Pray In Jesus' Name" news program. Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, stated that his prediction in a 2003 interview with the Associated Press that legalizing sodomy would be problematic had been proven correct.

"What I say is if you have the right to consensual sexual activity, then it opens the door to a variety of different things. And this ruling did it," Santorum said during the Colorado event. "This ruling followed up with what I said would happen if the Supreme Court ruled the way it did, and the Supreme Court has followed their line of reasoning that I identified very early on that if consensual sexual activity is a constitutional right, then we have to, it leads logically, as you saw in the court's opinion, that all things, that all the rights come with that."

Santorum had previously dismissed the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, according to MSNBC.

In 2003, Santorum said that "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. You have the right to anything. ... It destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. 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."

Watch the video below:

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