When Larry Craig, United States Senator from Idaho, entered the men’s room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 2007, he had earned a reputation as a trustworthy Reagan Republican, conservative, even tightfisted, when it came to public expenditures for the poor and middle class. Unknown to most, his private life was a terrible mess.
He was well known as a moral individual, even a moralist. He had a grating way with words, combining derision with childish phraseology. He was outspoken about Bill Clinton’s tryst with a White House intern:
The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy – a naughty boy. I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.
He was against rights for same sex couples, and his voting record reflected that. He was even against laws to protect gay people from being targeted for physical violence.
His arrest for soliciting a police officer in an adjoining stall was a surprise.
Americans can forgive many things when it comes to public figures. Bill Clinton is phenomenally popular today. Newt Gingrich managed to come back from the politically dead, at least for a while, after public contrition and a series of Hail Marys.
Hypocrisy is a deeper cut. And the “nasty, bad, naughty boy” derision of others was a haunting public persona.
Almost everyone who is in favor of gay rights can recall a change of heart. It was not too long ago that an overwhelming majority was solidly against the idea. It is possible that those of us raised in an era in which gay rights was so remote that the issue could not even be considered controversial may have available to us a special insight. I don’t recall when I changed my mind about gay rights. I do remember youthful years in which the relegation of gay people to the role of outcast was a natural part of life. We didn’t think about it, even a little.
I try to imagine how it might have been for someone struggling against his own nature, and how that struggle must have been replicated for millions of people who found themselves, perhaps to their alarm, attracted to those forbidden to them. The inner denial, the exaggerated opposition, the importance of opposition, had to have been damaging.
In the early 1980s, whispers grew to gossip about sexual goings on in the halls of Congress. Young male pages were said to be the objects of the fancy of male Congressional Representatives.
Larry Craig, then one of those representatives, felt compelled to issue a denial. He complained of the unfair suspicion that seemed to automatically follow someone who was guilty only of being unmarried. The next year he got married. A life traveled along hairpin turns, meant to dodge any evidence of inner turmoil, has to be a terrible way to live.
Years later, after the sad encounter in an airport restroom, Larry Craig fought off ethics charges. His trip and the incident, he told representatives of a Senate Committee, involved “purely personal conduct unrelated to the performance of official Senate duties.” It had nothing to do with the Senate. And so, it had nothing to do with his ethics as a Senator. This week his lawyers told a federal judge that using campaign funds to pay for his defense against the lewd conduct charges was okay because he was on official Senate business.
“Not only was the trip itself constitutionally required, but Senate rules sanction reimbursement for any cost relating to a senator’s use of a bathroom while on official travel”
That contradiction seems emblematic of a life of contradiction and denial.
I don’t recall when I began thinking sympathetically about gay rights. I remember an attitude more than active thought that attraction between those of the same sex was unnatural. And I remember a later time feeling that it was terribly wrong to discriminate against those same folks, or to regard adult love as unnatural. I don’t remember a turning point or epiphany.
Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a lesson in racism that I suspect might apply to most sorts of bigotry. He protests the prevailing wisdom that segregates racism to evil people. “To suggest that bad people were racist,” he writes, “implies that good people were not.”
This is the Racist Child Molester Serial Killer theory of America. Racists–should they even exist–are not people we know, but people who existed either in some distant history or in a far off cave somewhere.
I look to the life of Larry Craig with something less than righteousness. In some way I feel apologetic, both on his behalf, and toward him, for the life of contradiction he felt forced to twist himself into. That force came from the rest of us. It was applied to millions of other lives in ways that escape the imagination.
We were not evil people. In fact, many of us were very good people.
We good people were just unmindful of our thoughtless participation in great evil.
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