Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) had been a hard nosed opponent of gay rights for nearly half a century. He not only voted against gay marriage, he pushed for a constitutional amendment to keep states from allowing gay marriage on their own. He vigorously opposed any sort of protection for gays against discrimination. He even spoke out against protecting gays from hate crimes. He lectured the Senate on how important it was "for us to stand up now and protect traditional marriage, which is under attack by a few unelected judges and litigious activists." Religious conservatives were crazy about him.

When he was detained for soliciting sex from a plainclothes police officer in an airport restroom, he protested that it was all a series of misunderstood movements. The defense that became the most famous was that his "wide stance" had been mistaken for a sexual advance when his foot caressed that of the officer beneath the stall. It was one of several gestures that finally led to his arrest. He eventually pleaded guilty, then tried to withdraw the plea. Previous incidents came up. "I am not gay," he insisted in a press conference. "I never have been gay." Nobody believed him. Anti-gay crusader, secret gay, Senator Larry Craig became ex-Senator Larry Craig.

The incident was startling to me beyond the scandal itself. It served as a reminder of something I happened to stumble upon decades before. A small article in a 1960s newspaper had reported on the trial of a man arrested in a restroom for soliciting sex from an undercover police agent. The solicitation was the suspect tapping his foot under the wall of an adjoining stall. Police said this was well known by homosexuals as a sexual signal. The judge found the man not guilty. Tapping a foot under a stall did not meet the standard of proof required for a guilty verdict. The man went free.

I remember agreeing with the reasoning and the verdict. How awful that an accusation of something so shameful was based on something so innocent. The poor fellow could have been tapping as some tune ran through his head. Who among us could be the next to be falsely arrested?

It did not occur to me at the time, or for many years thereafter, that the awful crime for which the accused was arrested was not awful and ought not to have been a crime. I did not reject the thought, exactly. It was not even that I did not give it a second thought. I did not give it a first thought. Rejecting homosexuality as perversion seemed at the very core of normalcy.

Solicitation was the crime to which Larry Craig pleaded guilty. Hypocrisy is a part of guilt that is beyond legality. But even at that I wondered. Is it possible that his own unquestioning acceptance of a bigotry that may have seemed so normal forced him to an uneasy truce with his own wide stance?

The way of much prejudice, I think, is not mad, drooling monstrosity. Evil can more often be, as Hannah Arendt pointed out 45 years ago, banal. We accept it, even embrace it, holding it close to our hearts because it seems so normal. We do not recognize it for what it is.

“I don’t have prejudices,” a man boasted to me during that era of my younger innocence. “I’ll tell you who is prejudiced, though. It’s those god damn Irish Catholics.” He spoke with all the vehemence of Bill O’Reilly on a red faced rant. He spoke without showing a hint of conscious irony.

I sometimes wonder what unexamined biases lie comfortable and undisturbed within my soul. Most of my life has been spent in companionship with patient expectation that wisdom would come if I waited long enough. Over the years, I have witnessed much, and it is true that I have learned. But the greatest wisdom I have acquired is surprise at how little wisdom has come to me with age. It turned out to be a bad bargain.

I should have stayed young.