It looks as though the Sen Craig (R-ID) thing isn't going to "just blow over" anytime soon. If the actual crime were the story, it wouldn't have made it into a tabloid. It is just too common - this is why there are police sting operations - it is annoyingly common. It is, of course, the Who that makes it a story and that Who has made his career on family values. Funny, but bathroom sex seems to miss the family values target. Many Republicans are lining up to kick Larry Craig through the goal posts, and this is something to see.
These folks weren't the ones all over Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Mark Foley, Ted Stevens, and Abromoff, they certainly kept pretty quiet then. Nope, they're not all over the BushCo for infringing the Constitution, starting a war on false pretences, or using Executive Privilege to cover infractions, they're all over a tacky sex story, a minor misdemeanor. Some things have national impact, some things are just creepy.
So, Larry Craig has spent decades on a political career based on "Republican" values and his colleagues would like him pilloried. His constituents are not happy, the papers and other media are all over him, and he has a family. Wow, for a few furtive minutes in an airport restroom his world exploded. That stuff must have been damned important to him to risk it, a major Idaho paper was looking into allegations of gay sex and others had made inquiries. What his wife knew or knows hasn't been made public, but she certainly knew about the previous allegations and that had to be somewhat distressing. We know nothing about their relationship and all kinds of arrangements are made - in private - but this can't make for comfortable home life. (ok, do YOU know what arrangements the Clintons had?)
I do not know whether Larry Craig is gay or what and I don't care, but it is evident that something pretty damn tacky is important to him. Way more important than all the posturing about "family values." Way more important than being Mitt Romney's best bud. Way more important than the regard of his colleagues. That must be hell. It must be a truly nightmarish life to live with such a nasty secret that drives and drives one. This is the natural outgrowth of the Republican politics of "family values." These things must be secret, they must be furtively pursued, they must endanger things of vast importance to one's life, and finally they must involve some level of hypocrisy for those engaging in them. Terry Schiavo was the ultimate hypocrisy of Republican "family values" collision with individual decisions and they learned nothing.
A part of me would like to have sympathy for Larry Craig, I surely do have some for his family, but I can't work up to it for him. He has profited from his hypocrisy, he has built a life on it. I look at his wreckage and ruin with cold eyes, he worked hard for that and I'm willing to indulge him. He has made a career out of making some ordinary people's lives more difficult, lives that would in the best of circumstances be difficult. There is absolutely no way that heterosexuals can, at the final level, approve of homosexuality, the drive is too basic for either orientation to see it neutrally. So there is always going to be a disconnect between the vast majority and the minority in this and that will make life more difficult for the minority. All the equality under the law will not remove that, and Larry Craig and his ilk have done their utmost to increase that difficulty through the law. They've deliberately and knowingly harmed friends of mine and people whom they know and even employ for the sake of political advantage.
Welcome to Hell, Larry, I think you've earned it, have a nice long stay.
1 comment:
Excellent post, Chuck.
There's some scientific evidence that homophobia in men is associated with repressed or latent homosexuality. In one very interesting experiment a large group of men, all professed heterosexuals, were tested to determine how homophobic they were. They were then hooked up to a device that measures sexual arousal and shown hetero- and homosexual porn videos. The men who scored high on homophobia were aroused by the homosexual porn; those who scored low on homophobia were aroused only by the heterosexual porn.
People who have powerful homosexual urges but repress and/or deny them become filled with self-loathing, and they project this loathing onto people who are openly homosexual. This serves a dual purpose -- it discharges their negative emotions about themselves, and it reassures them that they are "not gay."
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