More Than a Potty Break
OK. OK. I’ve been swamped. Been ignoring this blog again. And some of the most loyal posters on this blog have spoken. They want to discuss the mess surrounding Larry Craig, the U.S. Republican senator from our neighbor to the north and the growing sex scandal enveloping him.
I can’t say I’m surprised. The Idaho Statesman has been chasing down a story about Craig and his long-rumored latent homosexuality for nearly a year. The story has been referred to often in the past couple of days, but in case you missed it, go here. I think the Statesman story nails the issue (so to speak), and it’s a good example of how news outlets frequently have the germ of a story for a long time before an event like Craig’s attempt at a public restroom tryst with a Minneapolis undercover cop breaks and allows them to publish. The Statesman got the goods; good on them. Sometimes the gods of breaking news just smile down on your newspaper and grant you an opportunity to finally tell the full story. So it was with Craig, and news that pretty much proves the gay orientation he has been denying for so long — even as late as yesterday.
So. The man is 62, an ultra-conservative in an ultra-conservative state who has built a Senate career largely on morals crusading. Never seen this plot line before, have we? I’m not sure what I could add. That the Craig scandal is deeply creepy? That, as Mitt Romney, whom Craig was working for in Idaho, says, it’s “disappointing?”
Hmm. I’d say it’s more than disappointing. “Disappointing” is when you’re 12-year-old breaks the neighbor’s window with an errant baseball and lies to you about it. “Disappointing” is when your husband forgets your wedding anniversary.
What is it then? Honestly, it’s crushingly sad. I could get all high and mighty the way so many Repubs did (including our own Utah congressional delegation) when Bill Clinton got caught “not having sex with that woman.” Most mortals who slip up now and again would admit to a bit of glee when a man like Craig gets snared in his own trap of humiliating hypocrisy.
The deeply sad part is the shame Craig must have lived with for god knows how many years. It’s almost a full-time job, I’d imagine, running on a “family values” platform every six years, and headlining conferences with speeches against the “gay agenda.” I can only imagine the self-hatred it must require to try to bring home the bacon from D.C. for your home state while simultaneously making quick side trips to public bathrooms, looking for a blow job from some anonymous male.
One gay activist quoted in a news story earlier this week talked about the way closeted people like Craig live in steady denial about their homosexuality by claiming they only have occasional “urges” for gay sex. Ergo, they aren’t gay, couldn’t possibly be gay, and why would anyone think for a minute they might be gay? An “urge” is just something that happens. You can’t control them.
So I have to think of the old saw: If it acts like a duck, quacks like a duck, it must be … a GAY man by the name of Sen. Larry Craig.
Man, if we could simply be true to ourselves, knowing that society would accept us for who and what we are. Sorry if I sound like a Care Bear or Mr. Rogers. But really. Think of the pain and suffering living his truth might have saved Craig’s wife, his family and everyone else caught in his fallout. But mostly himself.
What do you all think?
August 30th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Holly,
Thanks for writing about this topic. I’ve been following the news of this quite avidly, as a gay former mormon.
I completely agree with your conclusion, that it is our culture of demonizing gay people that creates a situation like Sen. Craig’s. I found the saddest part of this whole story to be his press conference where he said “I am not gay I have never been gay.” As though that was his crime! No “I’m sorry to put my wife through this humiliation” or “I’m sorry I committed a crime by soliciting sex in a public bathroom.” Nope - his first instinct was to make sure he let everyone know that he would never ever be something so completely gross as GAY. My god, what would people think? Okay, so I was looking for a little cheap sex in a restroom. Who cares? Hasn’t everyone done that at some point? But GAY? I could never be GAY!
It makes me angry, but it does also make me feel sorry for him. As you said, he’s been carrying this around his whole life, lying to others and himself and hating himself the whole time. And it’s a heavy burden. No matter what the moral majority blowhards would have people think, this is not something that’s just easily stepped into or out of. If this guy was so righteous and it’s possible to be “cured,” why didn’t god cure him? For me, in the end, that’s what helped me accept myself and move on - the knowledge that I’d done everything the church said to do, and this was still part of who I am. And maybe I’m luckier than some…through it all I really felt that God loved me, and in the end, this was who I’d been created to be.
Anyway…this isn’t limited to mormons of course. There are plenty of Ted Haggard’s out there in other religions too. But I do long for a day to come sometime in the future where it gets easier for people to accept themselves and each other for who we are and leave all the name-calling and shame behind.
August 30th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
sheri,
Move to the Bay Area..tolerance is the rule, not the exception.
I really feel sorry for Craig`s wife. Being paraded out for a news conference…like she is exhibit “A” for his heterosexual lifestyle. The guy is a bastard for such behavior. With Vitters from Louisiana the repubs have bookends for sexual hypocrisy.
Craig was student body president at the university of Idaho,also a member of Beta Theta Pi ( the “Butt Hut”). His prehensile lips were admired even then (1966).
August 30th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Holly,
Craig’s not Mormon. He’s Methodist.
Adam
August 30th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Bookends? They have pretty close to an entire shelf full.
As you said, it’s not the gay-ness. It’s the hypocrisy, and apparent self-shame.
Sad, really.
August 30th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Larry is drowning in his self loathing. I can’t feel sorry for this guy. He brought it upon himself while shooting down every and any bill that would advance and bring equal rights to LGBT throughout America. Even his fellow repugs aren’t tossing him a lifeline.
How does it feel, Larry treading water just to stay afloat.
August 30th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Methodists can be stupid too (no I’m not one but my grandmother, definitely NOT stupid is). I always thought Larry was LDS myself though Payette, ID, where he is from originally is not heavily LDS. That said, I can not stand the man and never could. He’s pretty much been in D.C. since I was in high school and I didn’t like him then. He talks like Snagglepuss and is a self-righteous beast.
By the way, the wife he didn’t marry until he was elected to Congress, and she already had kids, they didn’t have any together. Can you say “beard”? Sadly, I would bet she really had no idea any of this was going on. Even more sadly, and key to what kind of guy this really is, he hadn’t told her anything about this either, apparently, until the news broke.
That, my friends, is grounds for DIVORCE.
August 30th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Thanks to Adam for pointing out my error in misidentifying Craig’s religion. I have corrected above. Thanks for your sharp eyes, bloggers.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
[…] For a somewhat more local angle on the Larry Craig bass-ackwards sex scandal, see Mullentown. Most people plead innocent first, Senator. […]
August 30th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Obviously, the important thing is not his religion, just that he had one. Because if you claim standards of personal moral conduct dictated by some biblical source, it’s much easier to call someone a hypocrite.
If only Larry had been a Democrat and Governor of New Jersey, he could have written a book about it and gone on Oprah.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:08 am
No, the New Jersey Gov was different because he ADMITTED he was gay, albeit after the fact. Larry is still the Queen of DeNial.
Anyone who consistently votes “pro-family” whatever that is and condemns others for their “choice” of lifestyle and then conducts himself as Senator Craig has is a hypocrite. I’ve heard him rant for 27 years about how everyone should live just like him. Well, trust me, I don’t want to be looking for love in a restroom.
August 31st, 2007 at 7:35 am
LoL. So, if he admits he’s gay, then it’s cool, right?
I’m not saying this guy deserves any sympathy. I regard him as a hypocrite of the highest order for who he claims to be, and who he apparently IS while no one is watching.
My point being, if he ever admits he is gay, I get the feeling Oprah won’t have him on if he writes a book about it. Republicans retire in ignominy after things like this, and Democrats just write tell-all memoirs and get sympathy for living such repressed lives. And it all goes back to the “Family Values” Republicans pretend to represent, while Democrats have no such self-imposed burden. I could go on about how, as a Republican, I hate hate hate the term family values, but I think you get a sense of where I’m coming from.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:19 am
Anyone notice the different treatment given to Craig vs. David Vitters of Louisiana ? Could it be that Craig has defaced the top flag on the repub masthead…homophobia ?
Also Louisiana has a Democratic governor who might replace an ousted Vitters with a dem. Idaho will just find another ignorant redneck for Mr.Craig.
Vitters` defense was much better than Craig`s…straight out of Jimmy Swaggart. “Forgive me Lord,for I have sinned” Also, the New Orleans hookers were kind to Mr.Vitters…”he is just a regular guy, no drugs and easy on the S&M” In contrast they thought Swaggart a real shit. Maybe Jimmy has more demons.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:32 am
In case you didn’t catch it the first time around: “It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.” - George Santayana
ADD: There is no correlation between a person’s expressed religion and morality or character or behavior. My grandfather was a Methodist circuit preacher in Wyoming and after their last child was born my grandmother told him she didn’t want to have any more sex so he’d have to buy it somewhere but not where they lived so as to embarrass her. I got this information from their oldest daughter who was a realist.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:50 am
Great quote, Larry. I knew nothing about Sen. Craig until this event, how sad to end up being defined–or perhaps more accurately defining yourself–by the most sordid of your actions. Who knew the tell-tale signs of assignation in the loo–toe-tapping, luggage in the front of the stall, hand under the divider…
So what do you think? Should anyone in government whose sexual peccadillos are exposed resign their position? Clinton, Gingrich, Frank, Vitters, the latest but not last Craig? For me it at least partly depends on how it affects their constitutional duties, not primarily on whether it reeks of hypocrisy…
August 31st, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Too bad that Sen Craig has to be ostracized by his fellow congressional associates for maybe being gay rather than the fact that was looking for love in the men’s room. I must say though that when anyone from the holier-than-thou family values crowd crashes and burns, it just puts a smile on my face. Let’s not forget the likes of Ted Haggard and Mark Foley. What crowd pleasers those scandals were. I can’t wait to see who’s next. Ciao.
S
August 31st, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Yeah, the person apparently picked out to replace Craig, Jim Risch, is as we Democratic Idahoans call him…well, I won’t say what we call him but it goes down some pretty dark lines. I had some hopes, but now, it wouldn’t be any worse to have Larry than good ol’ Jim….
September 1st, 2007 at 7:01 pm
*sound of taps*
‘Bye Larry. It seems I really knew ‘ya.
Signed,
lostinutah
September 3rd, 2007 at 7:17 pm
I agree that there is no one sadder than someone who is so ashamed of who the are that they would deny it. The real criminal part of it is that Craig has to find gay sex in a restroom. I am apalled at that part! It is very sleazy and sick, indeed.
It is ironic that my definition of “family values” used to mean everyone within a home who loves and respects each other. Now it has taken on the meaning of exclusion for people who value their family as much or more than anyone– The gay/lesbian community. They are not the ones in the bathroom looking for sex. AND by the way, pedophiles are not gay!
September 8th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Holly, this is one of the best commentaries on this issue I’ve read.
I agree that the self-hatred by gay “family values” Republicans must be very sad.
I do find that Karma does seem to show up sooner or later — I would hope that a lesson will be learned on this issue. It’s time for the Republican Party to stop using the GLBT community as a political weapon.
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:03 am
Turkey Ringtones…
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Paul van dyk Ringtones
Polyphonic Ringtones
…