Larry Craig: Top or Bottom? Inquiring Minds Want to Know!
“I’m putting you where the action is.” - C.M. Burns
“Springtime fresh, winter white, what could be better?” - Mr. Smithers
Homophobia has always been one of our more complex prejudices. Think about it for a second: gay people can look just like regular people! I mean, you can hate just about anyone you want to (Jews, blacks, women, the Chinese, albinos, whatever), but at least you and your bigoted friends can be confidant that you aren’t one of those undesirables. (Assuming your forebearers didn’t pull a George Allen on you.) Ah, but then we have the Ted Haggards and Larry Craigs of the world. Those damn gays have camouflaged themselves - in the bodies of white Republicans, no less. The audacity!
Homosexual suspicion, that’s what a lot of homophobia is about. After all, there’s no such thing as black suspicion or Jew suspicion. No one in real life is going to experience a moment like Richard Pryor does in See No Evil, Hear No Evil where he discovers that he isn’t white at the tender age of forty-seven. (The only YouTube clip I could find of it is dubbed in Spanish, which almost makes it funnier.) But you can find out late in life that you’re gay, at least your friends and family can. My hunch is that you probably knew all along, eh Senator?
The upside of that omnipresent homo-danger is that it leads a lot of people to believe that being gay can be treated. After all, if it’s something that just hits you at some point in your life, especially late in life as is the case here, you should be able to get rid of it, right? Once you believe that sexuality is a choice you’re more than halfway to the conclusion that it can be therapeutically treated. That idea is laughably insane and contradicted by an avalanche of scientific and anecdotal evidence but the stigma of homosexuality is great enough that people will put the blinders on and crash ahead anyway.
I’m going to go way out on a limb here and assume that most of the people who believe that nonsense vote Republican. That, sports fans, is the reason that Larry Craig is still a senator and Ted Haggard is still a preacher. Confronted with incontrovertible evidence Haggard had to recant and make penance, but he’s all better now, “completely heterosexual”. Sure he is. Craig, meanwhile, went with the straight stonewall.[1] He said, “I am not gay. I never have been gay.” Well, that’s just super.
Let’s quickly parse that statement, shall we? “I am not gay.” Pretty straightforward, no room for wiggling or toe tapping there. Now for the kicker, “I never have been gay.” He sees it, I think, as a way to strengthen his denial. “I’ve never been gay! I’m certainly not like that Ted Haggard weirdo!” The implication is that people, which is to say human beings other than Senator Larry Craig, can be gay and then change back. Craig is, in effect, saying, “I didn’t even do that! That’s how not gay I am!”
It’s a brilliant statement; it shows that he understands homosexuality the same way as the “gays can be cured” crowd while simultaneously denying the whole thing. In fact, his handling of the entire affair should be taught and studied in public relations classes. It is a masterpiece of damage control.
Right after he was arrested he immediately pleads guilty (to try and make it go away). He didn’t have much choice, but it was still the right move. Pleading guilty keeps the details from ever being hashed out in court. A United States Senator, there are only 100 of them in the entire world, was arrested (in 2007, in an airport!) and nobody knew about it for two months! Two months of distance from the actual event was more than worth the guilty plea.
When the story finally did break he almost instantly promised to resign. Note the key word, “promised”. He didn’t actually resign, but that’s what the headlines said. One needed to get into the story a little bit before finding out that it wasn’t immediate. He bought two months with the guilty plea and another month and a half with the phony resignation. That’s a lot of news cycles.
Then he said he would try and appeal his guilty plea. He knew it wouldn’t work and, sure enough, it didn’t. I don’t think Craig wanted his appeal to succeed; if it had his actions would become central to the story once more. Instead, the Ballad of Larry Craig took another turn and now there’s lawyers involved, that’s always a downer as far as the general public is concerned. With each little twist in the story the audience shrinks just a little bit more, news about Craig becomes just a little bit older.
As things now stand he has said that he’ll finish his term and won’t run for reelection next fall. I have my doubts. I’m not saying that he’s running for sure, but I know he’s at least thinking about it. If he wanted it to be over he could’ve just quit and vanished. Instead he’s signed up to be a public figure until at least January of 2009. I don’t think he’s doing that for fun. He doesn’t want to retire a disgraced Senator and the only way he gets back on top is to win another election. He’s only turning 63 next year so he’s certainly young enough to run again and politicians view winning elections as a cure all, rightly so.
Cooler Republican heads, in Idaho or D.C., may yet prevail upon him to slink quietly away. They’re at enough of a disadvantage already without the Senator from Gay Bathroom Sex. But Larry Craig has been in Congress for a very long time and I’d be willing to bet that the Idaho Republican Party is littered with friends and people who owe him. Don’t count Larry Craig out yet, the man was caught soliciting sex from another man in a public bathroom and four months later he’s still a U.S. Senator. Imagine what he’ll be capable of four months from now.
[1] Sorry, I couldn’t resist a double pun.
