Can any aspect of the strange, sordid saga of Larry Craig offer the least
satisfaction to any thinking observer of American politics and society?
After a week of the kind of tawdry soap opera that so often makes up the
news of the day, a U.S. senator from Idaho announces that he plans to
resign, having pled guilty to disorderly conduct. (Although he now says he
wishes he hadn't.)
Yet other members of Congress have been less than orderly, and some have
even pushed around police officers without feeling the need to submit their
resignations. Why must he resign in disgrace? Because his real offense was
being caught up in a sex sting in a men's room at the Minneapolis airport -
a police operation set up to net homosexuals seeking assignations.
Yet the senator said he was resigning only because he "had little control
over what people chose to believe" about his conduct - even though his
resignation will surely be taken as a confession by those who will assume he
did just what the arresting officer accused him of.
The whole story is as pathetic as it is murky. It says something sad about a
senator and man who is unwilling to fight for his now professed innocence;
about a society in which cops have to be assigned to duty in men's rooms as
decoys; about the kind of politicians and commentators who have used the
senator's troubles to tar his political party or maybe his political ideas
in general; and about the general tendency even in this post-Freudian
society to base a whole range of two-bit psychoanalysis on the most meager
foundation of fact.
This is the kind of scandal du jour that should inspire a little more
humility on the part of us professional kibitzers, and remind us that
fashion can be as fickle in law and medicine as in any other human endeavor.
For there was a time when the psychiatric establishment officially
proclaimed homosexuality a mental illness; now we're told by an opposite but
equally certain band of Advanced Thinkers that any human grouping and
groping is the functional equivalent of the traditional family - despite
millennia of history, myth, sacred ritual and human development to the
contrary.
What fools these mortals still be. For there will always be those who think
of the past as only something to outgrow, not learn from.
Torn between its puritanical roots and the latest libertine fashion, a
society like ours can seem as confused and uncertain as Sen. Craig himself.
Perhaps the most shameful aspect of the whole story is the legion of
politicians, commentators and just plain snickering yahoos of every
persuasion to whom the sad story of Larry Craig proves Š exactly what they
believed before he became front-page news. Namely, that he exemplifies (a)
right-wing hypocrisy, or (b) the evils of homosexuality. Choose up sides and
let's fight. The facts in this case may not be clear but that doesn't keep a
lot of us from passing all-too-clear judgments. Continued... |