My take on the whole Former Senator Larry Craig fiasco.

I had meant to blog about this earlier, but thought the ship had passed. But the case was a big topic of conversation over the weekend with my friends. So I figure I could be safe talking about it.

For you who don't know, Larry Craig was a Senator from Idaho. He was arrested on June 11 for lewd conduct at a Minneapolis Airport, an arrest he pled guilty to at the beginning of August. You can read about it here.

The arrest stemmed from Craig allegedly attempting to receive gay sexual favors from an undercover police officer.

This is especially ironic considering that Craig's record in Congress is very non-gay friendly, with him voting for a law against same sex marriage and against laws regarding gays being discriminated in the work place and violence against gays being considered hate crimes. 

And I say "allegedly" because even though he pled guilty, he said that he did no wrong. He only pled guilty because he wanted the ordeal "to go away".

I never understood this argument. Pleading guilty or , like, Michael Jackson did, settling out of court with the defendant just to make nasty allegations "go away" never really seems to make them go away. More than anything, they act as confirmations that the rumors and accusations were true.

Craig's sexuality is called into question a number of times. He even mentions this in his statement a few days after the scandal broke, calling it a "witchhunt" and naming the Idaho paper, the Idaho Statesman, as a main culprit. As a matter of fact, he said that the stress newspaper's persecution was one of the main reasons why he pled guilty.

But Craig had maintained his innocence and has said repeatedly that he was not gay, even going so far as to accuse the arresting officer of trying to entrap him.

But the scandal brought pressure from some of his Republican co-horts to step down. On Saturday, he announced that he will step down at the end of the month.

My take on this?

• If he is innocent, then he quite possibly could be one of the most stupid people in the land. If the rumor is that you are secretly gay, and you are arrested for proposistioning gay sex, and you are innocent yet you plead guilty anyway, then you deserve to step down as a Senator. People who make that kind of bad decision should not be running the country.
• If he is guilty, well, he is simply a gigantic hypocrite. His political views border on the homophobic. To be have gay tendences and put up that front? He needs to seek counseling. He seems to be basing his political reputation, or at least part of it, at the expense of a group of people who I believe do not deserve that type of condemnation. He is infringing on the rights of a group that need the protection from violence and discrimination he is voting against. If he is in fact gay or bi and still does that, that is borderline evil.
• I don't envy the police officer who has to sit in a bathroom all day. God, the thought of the smell alone makes me wince.
• This might actually sound homophobic in and of itself, and I assure you that it is not intended to be, but I admire the system gay people have in regards to hooking up. For the record, according to the article, what Craig did was tap is foot, slide his foot over to touch the officers, and wiggle the fingers of the hand opposite the stall wall underneath the wall. (Just putting that out there in case anyone, like Craig, you know, "accidentally" do all of the above). Yes, that is a lot to go through, but if straight people had a similar method, my teenage years would have been much happier.