"How Larry Craig Got Screwed" or "The Double Standard of Homosexuality"

Larry Craig’s request to withdraw his guilty plea was denied last week by a Minnesota appeals court. As I’m sure you all know, he’s the Senator who has been in staunch opposition of several gay rights issues, from supporting the “Federal Marriage Amendment,” (of which he was a co-sponsor in 2008), to voting against a motion to extend the federal definition of hate crimes to cover sexual orientation. His rating on gay and lesbian issues from the Human Rights Campaign is an impressive goose egg (0).

I’m not going to get into a rant about his personal life, because I think that’s unnecessary. However, have fun reading this article from the Idaho Statesman: http://www.idahostatesman.com/eyepiece/story/143801.html.

Now, about the Screwing of Larry Craig…and no, it’s not what you think.
When he was caught, I rejoiced. It’s always fantastic when a holier-than-thou, anti-gay Republican is outed. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing I hate more than a hypocrite, and when said hypocrite has to pay for his hypocrisy, it’s golden.

But the issue with Larry Craig goes deeper than that. The focus for advocates shouldn’t be glee at his misfortune, but anger at how he was caught. If Larry Craig had been at a bar, hitting on someone for the purposes of having sex, it would have been perfectly legal. In fact, if he were to walk up to someone and say, “Hey, let’s go get freaky in the back room!” It wouldn’t be against the law until the sex act was performed…and only then if it was in public or if money was exchanged. No mysterious ‘wide stance’ foot tapping required.

But no, Larry was in a bathroom cruising for sex. How romantic.

The real focus should be why local and state dollars were spent on an expensive sting operation to catch gay men doing what regular people do all the time…try to get laid.

Our outrage should not be directed at Senator Larry Craig, as worthy as he is of outrage, but at the fact that looking for sex is a crime if you’re a gay man. That’s the true travesty here.

A colleague of mine at the ACLU mentioned casually that he was something of an “expert” in bathroom sex cases. He said they typically end up in court for long periods of time, involve public humiliation, destroy businesses and relationships, and have led to such deep depressions that men have killed themselves. They don’t do sex stings on women like this, because there is a clear double standard between male and female homosexuality and always has been. In WWII, homosexual men were sent to the gas chamber. Only one case of a pair of women had been sent to concentration camps for the sole reason of their sexuality. (Of course, that’s what the fantastic movie Paragraph 175 said a few years ago, I haven’t taken the time to update my info so it could be more.) The double standard is clear: fags are gross, lezzies are sexy. Gay men are unnatural, while women…well, women experiment and that’s okay.

I’m going to continue to enjoy Senator Craig’s anger about being railroaded, and the fact that he is clearly in denial about everything in his life. I’ll continue to feel sorry for his wife, who’s stuck in the middle of this whole thing. But ask yourselves this…how long should we allow the police departments to spend our hard earned tax dollars trying to catch lonely folks looking for a good time? How long should we be complicit? These stings aren’t meant to catch lewd behavior. These men aren’t exchanging goods for sex. These types of stings are meant to destroy the lives of men who are looking for anonymous sex from other men… men who are no different than the throngs of folks at clubs on the weekends. We need to be clear in our response to this type of stupidity: Privately, we can rejoice, but publicly we should condemn these wastes of taxpayer money.

And that’s how Larry Craig got screwed without even getting any. Poor guy.