Instead of examining Larry Craig's pro-war, anti-labour stands as Senator, the media will focus on his "distorted morality".
Public men’s rooms stink, but the publicity that emanates from illicit sexy encounters behind those closed stalls casts a truly toxic bouquet -- for the scandalized public figure that gets caught. Children learn they should not discuss functions done in those places. Indeed, scores of “dirty” words derive from acts performed there -- the same “dirty” ones done by every human from birth to death.
What makes public men’s rooms so exciting for men like Larry Craig or Walter Jenkins (a top Lyndon Johnson adviser who got caught in 1964 doing a sexual no-no in a YMCA men’s room)? Like Craig’s attempted homosexual dalliance, Jenkins’ rendezvous created public flutter.
“Poor Walter,” commented President Johnson when he learned of Jenkins’ arrest. But he made sure his humiliated friend would no longer work at the White House. Ironically, a Harris poll showed two thirds of the public shrugged off the incident, as most probably do in 2007 when homosexuality no longer remains a hidden taboo -- for practice or discussion. Most people respect privacy, but not hypocrisy. If Rudy Giuliani cross dresses in his house, that’s his business and not necessarily related do his thuggish nature. Bill Clinton had the opportunity for “playing around” -- Monica’s words -- and much of the public said: “go for it, Bill!”
Not Larry Craig. “The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy, a naughty boy,” he admonished the President during the Lewinsky scandal, like a parent scolding a child. “I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.” Was that Craig’s voice or his mother’s when she caught him as a child diddling himself?
If he believed Clinton was a naughty boy, how would he characterize his own pick-up routine, employed in the Minneapolis airport men’s room to proposition an undercover cop in the next stall -- who shouldn’t have been there in the first place? Right wing republicans’ harsh judgment on others for their sexual conduct creates a smarmy pool for themselves when they get caught. Polls show voters have turned against republicans; not for their closet -- or men’s room -- behavior, but for hypocrisy. “I’m not gay,” Craig bleated before resigning.
Craig’s former friends and colleagues forced him to resign to limit damage to “the Party” -- meaning themselves in the 2008 elections. His erstwhile good buddy and loyal companion Mitt Romney didn’t say “Poor Larry” as Lyndon Johnson would have. Instead, he called Craig’s behavior “very disappointing” as he disassociated him from the Romney presidential campaign, the one Craig had headed in Idaho.
I await Romney’s forthcoming book: “Rules of Eternal Loyalty and Lasting Friendship.” The Craig incident, said Romney, “reminds us of Mark Foley and Bill Clinton. I think it reminds us of the fact that people who are elected to public office continue to disappoint, and they somehow think that if they vote the right way on issues of significance or they can speak a good game, that we'll just forgive and forget,” he told CNBC (August 28). He summed up his feelings succinctly. “Frankly, it's disgusting.” (Foley and Clinton voted very differently, by the way. But who cares about facts when running for President?)
John McCain, another Republican contender, also confronted behavioral aberrations. Rep. Bob Allen, co-chairman of his Florida campaign, got busted for propositioning an undercover cop for a blow job in a public park’s men’s room. The Titusville, Florida, cop reported that Allen “approached the plainclothes officer and offered to perform oral sex for $20” -- in the men’s room. Where else?
Allen, in his seventh year in the Florida House, had intimated he planned to run for the Senate in 2008. Allen feebly explained that the cop was a “burly black man” and he “didn’t want to become a statistic” so he offered to blow him instead. (Orlando Sentinel, July 11, 2007)
Allen had previously supported Governor Jeb Bush’s proposed law to ban gays from adopting children. He also co-sponsored a bill to increase penalties for “offenses involving unnatural and lascivious acts” such as indecent exposure.
Congressman Mark Foley and Reverend Ted Haggard also helped give hypocrisy a bad name. Foley chaired the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and expounded vocally against child pornography. In charge of protecting young congressional pages, Foley hit on them instead. For a decade, he sent sexually suggestive messages and e-mails to good looking teenaged boys in the page program.
Homosexual and drug hating Haggard paid his masseuse to insert methamphetamine up his rectum before inserting himself. Haggard spent three weeks in “recovery” and then declared himself “completely heterosexual.” A major mover and shaker in the fundamentalist evangelical movement, Haggard also went to weekly meetings with Bush and his top aides and offered them spiritual advice -- like shun homosexuality and fight against gay rights.
Before the elders fired him, Haggard had made $138,000 a year as head of the National Association of Evangelicals and the 14,000-member New Life Church. Now he’s begun to fundraise again, this time, as Colorado Confidential headlined it, for “Ted Haggard’s Cash-for-Heaven Offer.”
KRDO Channel 13 in Colorado Springs reported that Haggard wrote to consumer reporter Tak Landrock about his plans to move into the Phoenix Dream Center to minister to ex-cons, recovering alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and “other broken people.” He already has spun a money-raising pitch: “It looks as though it will take two years for us to have adequate earning power again, so we are looking for people who will help us monthly for two years...Thank you so much. We feel our move into the Dream Center is the next step God would have us take. Any help we can get with this will be greatly appreciated and, I believe, rewarded in heaven.”
Louisiana Senator David Vitter’s name turned up on Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s escort service in Washington, D.C. Vitter apologized for his affinity to hookers, and made the usual references to how much he loved his family. Since his hanky panky occurred with the opposite sex, his Party colleagues and fellow parishioners didn’t punish him.
Other incidents with non elected Republican heavies add to the duplicity charges. According to one inside blogger, Glenn Murphy Jr., National Chairman of the Young Republicans, “got a fellow Young Republican drunk and then spent the night at his house. The other young man woke up in the middle of the night to find Murphy giving him mouth-to-penis resuscitation. After this incident, a 1998 sexual battery report came to light in which Murphy was alleged to have done the exact same thing.” Republican candidates had paid Murphy substantial fees as a consultant who regularly advised them “to use gay marriage as a wedge issue to paint their opponents as out of touch with traditional values.” (John Marcotte, Badmouth.net, Aug 31)
One gay wit quipped that “our average public restroom has more gay republicans in it than clean hand towels.” Another added: “The holier-than-thou party has spent an awful lot of time on their knees this past year, but they haven’t been doing a lot of praying.” Very funny. But men in the closet have had to use bathrooms for a century to engage in their sexual activities. It’s time to teach our kids to define politics and personal sexual proclivities in separate spheres.
As global warming, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a looming one in Iran demand public attention, the media and the politicians focus on an issue that doesn’t belong in the political arena: what a person does with his or her genitals, as long as it isn’t damaging others. Craig’s outing continues the trivialization trend of politics. The axiom of U.S. politics has become: preach righteousness and don’t get caught being human. Instead of examining Craig’s horrible pro-war, anti labor stands as Senator, most widely read blogs and gossip columnists will ask the irrelevant question: which Republican Senator will get caught next? “The Day of the Locust,” as Nathanael West predicted almost 70 years ago, is upon us.
