FOR LIBERALS such as myself, it is both immensely gratifying and deeply saddening when a gay-bashing Republican is revealed by some tawdry conduct to be a homosexual himself. The sight of an intolerant leader laid low by his own hypocrisy appeals to our sense of justice, yet we can't help but sympathize with a person so tormented by his sexual identity that he would join others in denouncing it.
The latest outed Republican is Larry Craig, the now-former Idaho senator who announced his resignation after it was revealed that he pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a sting operation targeting sexual activity occurring in bathrooms at the Minneapolis airport. Although Craig has vigorously denied that he is gay, it is difficult to imagine why he would have engaged in the courtship ritual he was accused of unless he was seeking sex.
According to police, Craig peeked into a bathroom stall occupied by an undercover officer, after which he sat down in the adjacent stall, tapped his foot, touched the officer's foot with his own foot and slid his hand along the bottom of the wall dividing the two stalls. Craig quickly pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in the hope that his arrest would never be discovered, but the congressional newspaper Roll Call broke the story last week.
The downfall of Senator Craig was sensational but hardly unique in a Republican party that seems to harbor a number of closeted homosexuals despite its general intolerance of homosexuality. Last year, Florida congressman Mark Foley stepped down amid reports that he sent sexually explicit instant messages to a teenage boy who served as a congressional page, while evangelical leader Ted Haggard resigned from his post at a Colorado mega-church after a Denver man claimed that Haggard had paid him for sex multiple times over a three-year period. In 2005, James West was recalled from his position as mayor of Spokane, WA after engaging in sexually explicit conversations in a gay internet chat room. And in 2004, Virginia congressman Ed Schrock dropped his bid for reelection amid claims that he is gay. The list, I'm sure, goes on.
There was a time when the sexual preferences of public figures were off limits for public discussion. But in an era when sexual morality is at the heart of issues ranging from abortion to gay rights to sex education and foreign aid, Americans, unfortunately, need to know about the sex lives of their leaders. When politicians take conservative positions on matters of sexual morality, voters are entitled to know if those positions reflect the true beliefs of their leaders, whether those positions are political posturing or if, perhaps, those positions reflect the mere aspirations of a longtime conservative struggling with his sexual identity. And when politicians are unable to abide by the moral demands they would make of others, voters are entitled to ask whether those demands should form the basis of public policy.
Republicans have long regarded themselves as the guardians of American morality, pushing self righteous and impractical policies, like abstinence only sex education, rooted in an imagined past where sex occurred only in awkward and infrequent encounters between men and their wives. Yet time and again, Republicans have shown themselves unable to meet their own moral commands, succumbing to the same urges and instincts that animate every warm-blooded human being. On his Web site, Louisiana senator David Vitter touts his commitment to "making life better for his young family and all Louisiana families," yet this summer he all but admitted to patronizing prostitutes after his telephone number was found in the records of a Washington escort service. For all of their family values, congressional Republicans are probably no better than the average American when it comes to their sexual behavior and they certainly have no business playing sex police.
Unfortunately, the Republican response to the Craig scandal has been devoid of any such introspection, with scandal weary leaders seeking simply to oust their fallen colleague as quickly as possible. Such is understandable, but when the dust settles, Republicans ought to ask whether the time has come to stop fretting about the sexual preferences of other people. Conservative sexual morality often makes for poor public policy and in any case, it is an odd kind of morality that would force an upstanding citizen like Craig to seek his sexual satisfaction in a furtive encounter with a stranger in an airport bathroom.
I'd like to exult in the fall of a senator whose votes on issues like gay marriage would systematically discriminate against homosexuals for no other reason than their private sexual behavior. But given Craig's own apparent homosexuality, it's almost too sad to enjoy.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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