Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Larry Craig is Definitely Not Gay

A proud gay man lives his adult life with his male partner or husband, not a wife and kids. Gay men do not support a constitutional amendment to prohibit same sex marriage. Gay men do not vote against long-overdue legislation that would protect gay men and lesbians from discrimination in the work place (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or ENDA).

On the other hand, repressed, hypocritical, right-wing politictions with homosexual tendencies behave exactly as Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) has done in the past two months and throughout his political career. How ludicrous to believe that one of the hundred or so most powerful people in the United States was intimidated by a Minnesota beat officer into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.

In a “he said, he said” case such as this one, Senator Craig could well have denied the officer’s interpretation of the several easily misunderstood actions the Senator reportedly took in the airport bathroom. Moving from one stall to another? No toilet paper! Tapping one’s foot toward the next stall? Groovy muzak! Waiving at your stall neighbor under the divider? Those crazy Idahoans are so friendly!

Of course, unlike most closeted men with homosexual tendencies caught soliciting sex in a public restroom, Senator Craig thought he held a trump card, literally, his business card. He waived it at the officer like the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in Monopoly. Too many nameless and unheralded closeted men with homosexual tendencies have not had that card to play and hundreds, actually thousands, have lost jobs, families and – through suicide – their lives as a result of similar arrests. If Senator Craig hadn’t lost his nerve, if he had stood tall and claimed that as a U.S. Senator it was his God-given right to have sex in any bathroom he saw fit….Well, let’s just he could been immortalized as the patron saint of all closeted men with homosexual tendencies. What a missed opportunity!

Though Larry Craig is clearly correct when he says he’s not gay, he was a wrong about another thing. Larry Craig claimed his arrest cast a “cloud over Idaho.” This is not true. Idaho is a beautiful state with crystal clear skies and lakes. What he cast was a big shameful, shroud-like cloud over the conservative right-wing in this country, which is just as homosexual as any other segment of the population, but refuses to accept the honesty and pride of being gay.