When Bill Clinton was impeached, Larry Craig declared him a "nasty, bad, naughty boy" and voted in favor of the resolution.
When gay rights legislation came to the floor of the Senate, Craig voted against himself numerous times, remarking outrageously about homosexuals with each bill he rejected.
When a policeman confronted him after Craig signaled his desire to have sex in a Minnesota airport, Craig flashed his senator identification and asked, "What do you think of that?" then proceeded to lie when confronted with the accusation that he was fishing for sex, prompting the policeman to sneer, "I can't believe people vote for you."
It wasn't until he was told that a "guilty" plea to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct would keep the incident private and enable him to avoid any awkward questions about his sexuality that he stopped fighting. Unfortunately for him, the information leaked and his career as a senator is over.
Good riddance. I'd na-na-na-na kiss him goodbye, but I'm afraid I'd catch something. That's the first exception I take with Larry Craig: by engaging in anonymous, no-strings-attached, possibly-and-probably unprotected sex in washrooms around the nation, he is potentially spreading diseases that plague our society to unsuspecting perverts and maybe to their unsuspecting significant others, as well as future sexual partners. Even worse, assuming he has any interest in women and his wife is more than a trophy, he's endangering her physical well-being with his habits.
Beyond the health hazard Craig poses to society, he represents an attitude that merits nothing but disrespect. He is a homosexual pretending not to be who is, thus, forced to such lows to achieve sexuality. You can't be true to anyone until you're true to yourself, and by that standard, Craig is one of the more dishonest men on the planet, deceiving his family and the state of Idaho due to his power-lust. To be sure, his homosexuality was well-known in Republican circles, as that sort of thing always is, and that's where the greater exception comes: you'll never have more power over another than you have over yourself, but Craig traded his freedom for a vote in the senate, and for that he deserves nothing but scorn and contempt.
Some argue that Craig didn't deserve to be detained in that restroom to begin with, and that is an argument well-worth dissecting. The first part of it is, "He wasn't charged with soliciting sex. He was charged with disorderly conduct." A little context: the airport police had received complaints about gay men having sex in the washroom so they set an undercover police officer there to wait for propositions. Craig came and followed the routine for soliciting sex to a 'T': he peeked through the crack in the door, sat in the next stall, rubbed his foot against the policeman's and waved him over under the stall, inviting him to join him. At that point, they told him he was to come with them and he refused. He was charged for disorderly conduct as a result.
Should he have been detained? Absolutely. Nobody should be having sex in public restrooms, and anybody who gets busted on the prowl should be questioned. If they're rowdy, they deserve to be charged with disorderly conduct, and he was. Then he tried to justify himself with his status as a senator. Now he doesn't have that to brag about. So what will he tell the president now? What will he tell himself? Now he has nothing but his shame and regret, a lonely man with no self-respect or pride who has been exposed as a hypocrite and a liar.
When a politician disgraces his office by disgracing himself, when a politician displays such an inability to be true to himself, he must be replaced by someone with a sense of integrity ? rare though those politicians are. If pretending to be someone you aren't and subsequently being exposed as a creepy fraud doesn't merit disqualification from the upper level of Congress, what does?
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