[NYTr] Frank Rich: Pardon Poor Larry Craig

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Sep 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/opinion/23rich.html?n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Frank%20Rich

Pardon Poor Larry Craig

By FRANK RICH

"I DID nothing wrong," said Larry Craig at the start of his long
national nightmare as America's favorite running, or perhaps sitting,
gag. That's the truth. Justice lovers of all sexual persuasions must
rally to save the Idaho senator before he is forced to prematurely
evacuate his seat.

Time's running out. The final reckoning may arrive this week. On
Wednesday, a Minnesota court will hear Mr. Craig's argument to throw
out the guilty plea he submitted by mail after being caught in a June
sex sting in the Minneapolis airport. If he succeeds, there's a chance
he might rescind his decision to resign from the Senate on Sept. 30.
Either way, he should hold tight.

Not only did the senator do nothing wrong, but in scandal he has proved
the national treasure that he never was in his salad days as a
pork-seeking party hack. In the past month he has served as an
invaluable human Geiger counter for hypocrisy on the left and right
alike. He has been an unexpected boon not just to the nation's
double-entendre comedy industry but to the imploding Republican Party.
Gays, not all of them closeted, may be among the last minority groups
with some representation in the increasingly monochromatic G.O.P. If it
is to muster even a rainbow-lite coalition for 2008, it could use Larry
Craig in the trenches.

On the legal front, Mr. Craig is not without his semi-spirited
defenders, an eclectic group including Arlen Specter, the A.C.L.U., The
Washington Post's editorial page and scattered Democrats. While there's
widespread agreement that Mr. Craig was an idiot not to consult a
lawyer before entering a guilty plea (for disorderly conduct, a
misdemeanor carrying a $575 fine), idiocy is no more a federal offense
than hypocrisy, especially in Washington.

What Mr. Craig did in that men's room isn't an offense either. He
didn't have sex in a public place. He didn't expose himself. His toe
tapping, hand signals and "wide stance" were at most a form of
flirtation. As George Will has rightly argued, if deviancy can be
defined down to "signaling an interest in sex," then deviancy is what
"goes on in 10,000 bars every Saturday night in our country." It's free
speech even if the toes and fingers do the talking.

The Minnesota sting operation may well be unconstitutional, as the
A.C.L.U. says. Yet gay civil rights organizations, eager to see a
family-values phony like Mr. Craig brought down, have been often muted
or silent on this point. They stood idly by while Republicans gathered
their lynching party, thereby short-circuiting public debate about the
legitimacy of the brand of police entrapment that took place in
Minnesota. Surely that airport could have hired a uniformed guard to
police a public restroom rather than train a cop to enact a punitive
"Cage aux Folles" pantomime.

A rare gay activist to stand up forthrightly for Mr. Craig is Franklin
Kameny, whom the Smithsonian Institution recently honored with an
exhibition documenting his lonely Washington protests for gay civil
rights in the pre-Stonewall 1960s. When I spoke to him last week, the
82-year-old Mr. Kameny said that many Americans don't seem to know how
much the law has changed in recent years. Though he's no admirer of Mr.
Craig, whom he describes as "a self-deluding hypocritical homophobic
bigot," he publicly made the case for the senator's innocence in a
letter to the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com.

"Fair is fair," Mr. Kameny wrote. Mr. Craig, guilty of no public sex
act, "was the victim of a false arrest and a malfeasant prosecution."
Even had he invited the police officer to a hotel room, there still
would have been no crime. The last American laws criminalizing gay sex
between consenting adults were thrown out by the Supreme Court in 2003.

The hypocrisy in some quarters of the left about the Craig case is
arguably outstripped by that on the right, heaven knows. It has been
priceless to watch conservative politicians and bloggers defend their
condemnation of Mr. Craig in contrast to the wide stance of tolerance
they've taken toward David Vitter, the inimitable senator from the Big
Easy.

On the same day Mr. Vitter was deploring MoveOn.org at the
Petraeus-Crocker hearings two weeks ago, a (female) prostitute was
holding a California press conference with Larry Flynt about her
alleged participation in the unspecified sins to which the senator has
publicly confessed. "He was a very clean man," she helpfully explained
to The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. "He came in, took a shower, did
his business and would leave."

Mr. Vitter, a shrill defender of marriage, still has the support of the
G.O.P. hierarchy. Many believe that the Senate minority leader, Mitch
McConnell, and his posse tried to Imus Mr. Craig and send him packing
in a single week because Idaho has a Republican governor (nicknamed
"Butch," no less) who would appoint a Republican successor. (The
governor of Louisiana is a Democrat.) Others argue simply that
Republican leaders are homophobes who practice a double standard for
heterosexual offenders. But the reality is more complicated.

As we learned in the revelations surrounding the years-long cover up of
the Mark Foley scandal, there may be more gay men in the Republican
leadership on Capitol Hill than there are among the Democrats. Even
Rick Santorum, the now-departed senator who likened homosexuality to
"man on dog" sex, had a gay director of communications. Homophilia and
homophobia have been twin fixtures in the modern G.O.P. at least since
the McCarthy-era heyday of Roy Cohn.

As Rich Tafel, the former executive director of the gay Log Cabin
Republicans, points out, this internal contradiction could not hold
once Karl Rove and President Bush decided to demagogue the issue of
same-sex marriage by pushing it into center stage of a national
political campaign. That meanspirited and cynical election-year
exploitation of homophobia accelerated the outing of Republicans by
activists on the left.

"It made gay Republicans targets," Mr. Tafel told me last week.
(Stories about Mr. Craig percolated on the Internet long before the
airport incident.) In response, Mr. Tafel said, fearful gay Republicans
on the Hill have retreated deeper into the closet. The Bush-Rove
strategy "created the Larry Craigs," he said. "It created that man
crawling around toilets."

Mr. Craig has denied being gay. Perhaps someone might believe him had
he not, in 1982, gratuitously proclaimed his innocence in a pre-Foley
page scandal, even though no one had accused him of anything. But
whatever Mr. Craig's orientation, many closeted Republicans remain in
place on Capitol Hill, easy targets for political opponents who want to
expose G.O.P. hypocrisy.

Were Mr. Craig now to keep his seat, maybe his trial by fire would
drive him to end his perennial gay baiting and become a latent
proselytizer for a return to a more open, live-and-let-live
Republicanism in the retro style of Barry Goldwater. Granted, Mr. Craig
has shown no leadership of any kind in his career to date. But if Trent
Lott can have a second chance after seeming to embrace the Dixiecrat
racialism of Strom Thurmond, why not the toe-tapper from Idaho?

The G.O.P. needs at least one minority group in its ranks if it's going
to be a viable political party in the 21st century. As the former
vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp asked rhetorically last week, "What
are we going to do — meet in a country club in the suburbs one day?"
His comment was prompted by the news that the major Republican
candidates had claimed "scheduling conflicts" to avoid a debate at a
historically black college in Baltimore. This was so obvious a slight
that even Newt Gingrich labeled the candidates' excuses "baloney," and
the usually controversy-averse Jay Leno was moved to call for the
Republicans to "change their minds" after the debate's moderator, Tavis
Smiley, aired the issue on "The Tonight Show."

The brushoff of that debate followed a similar rejection by the same
candidates (except John McCain) of a debate sponsored by Univision, the
country's most-watched Spanish-language network. It's only the latest
insult to Hispanic voters, the fastest-growing American minority.
Without Hispanics, the G.O.P. is doomed in swing states from Florida to
Nevada. If you have any doubts, just look at the panic at the staunchly
Republican Wall Street Journal editorial page. It has now even started
attacking its own cohort — what it calls "Fox News populists and
obsessive bloggers" — for driving away once-Republican Hispanic votes
with over-the-top invective about illegal immigrants.

It would be unfair to say that the G.O.P. is devoid of sensitivity to
all minorities. True, Peter King, the Long Island congressman, said
last week that America has "too many mosques," but he was balanced by
Mitt Romney, who sent out a press release wishing "the Jewish people" a
hearty "L'Shanah Tovah" for the New Year. And let no one fault the
Republican presidential field for not looking like America: Alan Keyes
is back!

But the last minority with at least a modicum of influence in the
party's power structure seems to be closeted gay men. As an alternative
to cruising men's rooms, the least they could do is use their clout to
stay the manifestly unjust execution of Larry Craig.

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