U.S. Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) pleads guilty after being arrested for making sexual advances on a plainclothes officer in an airport men’s room. Sen. Craig has long been rumored to be gay. What’s with all of these elected Republicans being nailed for sex crimes? And cruising in bathrooms, at that? I haven’t written about any of the prior incidents, because I figured it was coincidental that they’re Republicans, but it’s getting a bit ridiculous.
Well clearly, Judge. But you got to admit; Foley, Vitter, not Craig. Come on, Republicans are supposed to get caught with MONEY, not with sex. Democrats are the perverts, remember? But now your guys are the ones who can’t keep their pants on, and its our guy with freezer money.
The world is upside down. What’s next, Cats and Dogs living together in harmony?
Posted by Dannyboy on 28 August 2007 @ 12am
That’s pretty funny, Danny. Something tells me the good people of Idaho are not going to be as forgiving as those in Louisiana.
Posted by Judge Smails on 28 August 2007 @ 8am
I have to wonder. Idaho is a really weird place. I wouldn’t dare make any forecasts as to how this will affect Sen. Craig’s career.
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 28 August 2007 @ 9am
Democrats are generally tolerant of gay people and of gay relationships. Republicans are generally not. So it’s not that Republican leaders are any more likely to be gay than Democratic party leaders, it’s just that Democratic party leaders are more likely to be ‘out’ and in a serious, committed gay relationship. Meanwhile, their GOP counterparts do not have this option and thus their only sexual outlet seems to involve either male prostitutes or public bathrooms. The gay Republicans’ sexual outlet leads to scandal while the gay Democrats’ outlet does not.
By the way, can anyone tell me what was the name of the top Nixon aide who was caught having sex with a man in a public bathroom a few blocks away from the White House? I cannot remember his name but I do remember his most excellent quote in explanation of his actions: “I was befuddled by lack of food and sleep.”
Posted by Jack on 28 August 2007 @ 9am
Greg Marmalard. Faber College, ‘62. Nixon White House Aide. Raped in prison.
Posted by Judge Smails on 28 August 2007 @ 10am
Ah ha, here it is: Walter Jenkins. He was Johnson’s top aide.
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 28 August 2007 @ 12pm
Hey Danny,
Found this on National Review Online. Although I generally agree w/ the point you made about scandals re Dems and Repubs, this points in another direction - at least in England. Now I’m thinking maybe we’re just conditioned to believe the conservative party members are greedy thieves while the liberal party members engage in all sorts of debauchery.
Re: Republican Repression [Iain Murray]
“It was always the British adage that “Socialists get caught with their hand in the till, Tories get caught with their trousers down.” While Tony Blair was cleaning out “Old” Labour, whose members’ affinity with labor unions and significant patronage in local councils enabled the odd bit of corruption, John Major’s government Ministers were quite happily engaging in all sorts of sexual shenanigans. The result was a party-wide reputation for “sleaze.” I have suggested before that the GOP might be going the same way.
One thing that particularly incensed the British public was Ministers’ refusal to resign when they were caught. As I recall, one wag summarized it as follows: “In the old days, a Tory would retire to the library, a waiter would bring in a bottle of whisky and a pearl handled revolver and they’d do the decent thing. Today, they’d shoot the waiter and run away with the whisky.”
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjUzNjI0M2JjYmY5OGZlMGJhMmY2NzkxYjQxNGE2MTk=
Posted by Judge Smails on 28 August 2007 @ 4pm
I’ve been thinking about this guy today and, man, what a poor bastard. The guy’s presumably gay, and he’s so far in the closest that he’s found himself arrested after propositioning a total stranger in a bathroom. And rather than admit that he’s gay and point out the absurdity of it being a crime to proposition somebody (but only if it’s somebody of the same sex), he’ll instead announce his retirement and quietly disappear.
This is how stupid laws continue to exist.
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 28 August 2007 @ 4pm
I encourage folks to take a few minutes to read the Al Weisel story on Walter Jenkins that Waldo linked to. It’s a sad and moving piece about a man who was a dedicated public servant. It pains me to see what misery and humiliation people have had to go through just for being who God made them.
Posted by Harry Landers on 28 August 2007 @ 5pm
I have to concur with what others have said: I’m not sure I see the crime here. The worst he allegedly did was look into the stall where the officer was: though this could simply have been him waiting for the officer, who apparently spent THIRTEEN MINUTES in there, to come out and let someone else use the john.
Everything after was all supposedly some sort of elaborate gay cruising code in which you are supposed to understand that tapping your foot and waving your hand means something.
But as far as I know, it’s perfectly legal to walk up to someone and flat out ask “hey, you want to have sex?” It’s illegal to have sex in the bathroom, but no one was doing that or even asked to do it.
So aside from potentially the peeping tom act, which is pretty hard to prove anyway, where’s the crime?
It seems more like this guy pled guilty because fighting the charge would have given him more publicity. He was basically royally screwed either way.
You probably all know I’m not the biggest fan of Republicans, or people that try to hurt gay people and are secretly gay themselves… but this whole thing seems sort of like bullshit.
Posted by plunge on 28 August 2007 @ 6pm
I recommend reading the arrest report, plunge. This guy was clearly cruising, in the same sense that if I approached you, clenched my fist, shook it in your face and glared at you menacingly, it would be a threat. I could pretend it was a friendly form of a greeting with which you were apparently not familiar, since I hadn’t actually uttered the words “I am going to hurt you,” but you wouldn’t buy that any more than a judge would.
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 28 August 2007 @ 6pm
Well, I do see Plunge’s point and I do sort of feel sorry for this guy. However I think he pled guilty to ‘disturbing the peace’. I guess one could construe unwanted sexual advances in a public bathroom to be a disruption of the peace. Also, apparently the cop was in there because there had been complaints about this sort of thing going on. Given that context the disturbing the peace charge (and subsequent guilty plea)seems fairly reasonable to a lay person like myself.
Posted by Triscula on 28 August 2007 @ 7pm
No, he’s a repressed homosexual:
Over five months, the Statesman examined rumors about Craig dating to his college days and his 1982 pre-emptive denial that he had sex with underage congressional pages.
And I hear ya Harry. Imagine being a gay hillbilly in a community where preachers talk of a cure and people listen, nod in agreement, and piously witness the lie?
But this is nothing like that. This is a United States Senator who used his office to suppress the rights of gay people, and demonstrated his “family values” by living a lie. Larry Craig would have had a hard time doing more damage with a handgun.
Posted by Bubby on 28 August 2007 @ 7pm
There are few congessional districts, to say nothing of entire states, that would be willing to elect an openly gay/les candidate. That’s just true.
So what’s a homosexual politico to do? I don’t know, but I gotta believe it could be handled more deftly than Larry Craig, Jim McGreevey or Mark Foley did.
Posted by Judge Smails on 28 August 2007 @ 7pm
Yeah, Bubby, he’s the only reason I used “few” instead of “zero.”
Incidentally, I respect Frank a lot and think he’s one of the smartest, savviest pols on either side of the aisle. There’s a great anecdote about him in G. Stephanopolus’s Clinton memoir, “All Too Human.” G.S. is testifying before a House Cmte about some matter or other and is understandably nervous - it being his first time doing this. About halfway through, Frank, who’s on the cmte., sends an aide down to G.S. at the witness table with a note that reads: “Don’t worry. We’re kicking the shit out of them.”
Posted by Judge Smails on 28 August 2007 @ 8pm
This whole Brokeback Congress thing is just killing me.
The Republican leadership got behind Vitter quickly because he went to them before the story broke and followed their advice on how to weather it. They are pissed at Craig because they first they heard about it was when the story broke, not giving them time to crank up the spin machine. Look for their leadership to abandon him and back a challenger in the Idaho primary.
Posted by iknowcville on 29 August 2007 @ 9am
I read the arrest report, and it’s nothing. And, again, no offer of money was made. Nothing lewd was actually done. Some guy got his foot touched by another foot. You can call it cruising if you want, but the point is that I don’t see a legitimate crime there: if the officer was looking for one, he jumped the gun and pulled out his badge far too early.
Like I said, its not a crime to flirt with someone or even ask them if they want to have sex. At the very worst, that’s ALL the officer seems to have been able to support. Any half-decent lawyer could have torn a giant hole through this and gotten it laughed out of court.
However, Craig didn’t have that option, because fighting it would be more public than not fighting it, even if he didn’t do anything criminal. So basically, the officer blackmailed him into pleading.
Not exactly the finest moment for the police.
Posted by plunge on 30 August 2007 @ 3am
Like I said, its not a crime to flirt with someone or even ask them if they want to have sex.
In some states, if you’re gay, I do believe that it is a crime.
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 30 August 2007 @ 9am
“In some states, if you’re gay, I do believe that it is a crime.”
I’m not aware of any in which these laws are either enforced, or constitutional.
Again, any lawyer could have gotten these charges thrown out with almost no effect. But Craig could not have taken that option without making the accusations much much more public and highlighted. As it was, by keeping quiet he almost succeeded in putting it behind him without anyone noticing: it did stay under cover for months after all.
Posted by plunge on 30 August 2007 @ 3pm
I’m not aware of any in which these laws are either enforced, or constitutional.
Well, in Virginia sexual contact between two people of the same sex is illegal. Wouldn’t two people of the same sex planning to have sexual contact qualify as conspiracy to commit that crime?
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 30 August 2007 @ 7pm
I just listened to the audio of the cop’s interview with Craig. He tried to appear indignant and reasonable at the same time - you can’t do both. As one commenter noted, imagine if Sens. Warner or Webb were arrested for tapping his foot in the crapper. It would take either of ‘em 15 minutes just to understand what the fuss was about and then, well, if I was the cop I’d lookout for a fist in the face.
Posted by Judge Smails on 30 August 2007 @ 9pm
No Waldo. Even if it was an enforceable crime (it’s not: all such laws were invalidated by Bowers v Harkwick), the officer did not get enough to actually make any sort of credible case that Craig wanted sex. Let’s say that Craig IS gay, and he WAS hot for the officer. Still, maybe all he wanted was to rub feet or flirt. That’s all the officer could credibly establish, and none of it is criminal or even lewd conduct. If the behavior continued after someone asked him to stop, it could be a harassment charge, but it didn’t go that far.
Craig is completely correct: the actions of the officer were entrapment and essentially amounted to blackmail: this officer puts people in a situation in which they are pressured into pleading to a bogus charge, or else they get to have the officer out them. The officer did NOT let the encounter proceed to the point where he had anything criminal. He stopped the encounter after he got something merely potentially embarrassing, and then used that to help leverage what I assume is his quota of convictions.
That’s really, in fact, sort of despicable.
Posted by plunge on 31 August 2007 @ 10am
Plunge… don’t have a heart attack, but I agree with you. This entire episode has been a bit puzzling to me.
As a slight correction, Bowers v. Hardwick was a SCOTUS case about 20 years ago that upheld Georgia’s sodomy law. The Court reversed itself in 2002 or 2003 (forgot which), in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Kennedy writing for a 6-3 majority. That decision invalidated state sodomy laws.
Posted by I.Publius on 2 September 2007 @ 5pm
FWIW, it’s Bob McDonnell’s opinion, as attorney general, that Lawrence v. Texas does not invalidate the state’s criminalization of sodomy and oral sex. Lawrence v. Texas was decided substantially on the matter of equal protection, since the law applied only to same-sex couplings. Here in Virginia, we bar anybody from engaging in those acts, thus McDonnell’s assertion that our laws on the matter remain fully in effect.
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 2 September 2007 @ 6pm
Was Lawrence decided solely on equal protection grounds? I seem to recall that substantive due process, and the right of privacy as derived from Griswold, was a key aspect of Kennedy’s decision. It’s been several years since I read Lawrence, but if my memory is correct, and Kennedy relied in part on substantive due process, then, AG McDonnell’s persuasive opinion notwithstanding, I wouldn’t be too confident that a prosecution under Virginia’s statute would withstand an appeal.
Posted by I.Publius on 2 September 2007 @ 7pm
I haven’t read the decision since it came down, either, but my recollection is that equal protection was just a part of the calculus. It was McDonnell’s assertion (again, if memory serves) that its reliance on equal protection, though, was sufficient not to have to concern ourselves with removing Virginia’s sodomy laws, because they’re unaffected. I would certainly hope that a prosecution in Virginia would be tossed, but my knowledge of the practical aspects of the legal system on a state level is virtually nonexistent.
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 2 September 2007 @ 8pm
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