Washington ? Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tenn., defended Sen. Rick Santorum on Wednesday as a “voice for inclusion and compassion” while the White House remained silent on the Pennsylvania Republican’s remarks about homosexuality.

Frist and Pennsylvania’s senior Republican senator, Arlen Specter, rallied to Santorum’s side after all of the leading Democratic presidential contenders condemned him for comparing gay sex to incest, bigamy and polygamy in an interview published Monday by the Associated Press.

“Rick is a consistent voice for inclusion and compassion in the Republican Party and in the Senate, and to suggest otherwise is just politics,” Frist said in a statement.

Specter said he accepted Santorum’s assurance that the remarks to the AP “should not be misconstrued in any way as a statement on individual lifestyles.”

“I have known Rick Santorum for the better part of two decades, and I can say with certainty he is not a bigot,” Specter said.

Some Democrats and gay-rights groups maintained that Santorum has a history of hostility to legal equality for gays and should step down as chairman of the Republican Conference, the GOP’s No. 3 leadership post in the Senate. In the full text of the AP interview, Santorum included gay sex in the category of “deviant” behavior that threatens to “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family.”

Wednesday at the White House, press secretary Ari Fleischer said President Bush would not comment on Santorum’s remarks.

Throughout the day, Democrats contended that the White House was trying to avoid taking a position that would alienate gays or conservatives from the GOP. Republicans contended that the Democrats were hoping for a repeat of the furor over Sen. Trent Lott in December that began when the Mississippi Republican praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign and ended with Lott’s resignation as Senate majority leader.

“As additional reports have come to light, revealing a disturbing history of inflammatory, antigay rhetoric by Senator Santorum, the deafening silence of President Bush and his party has become inexcusable,” said Howard Dean, the Democratic presidential candidate who signed a bill allowing same-sex unions when he was governor of Vermont.