Wide Stance

Another week, another conservative politician arrested on a morals charge. Senator Larry Craig of Idaho has pleaded guilty to “disorderly conduct” for attempting to have sex with a police officer in an airport toilet.

Naturally, Senator Craig is a politician devoted to family values. Naturally, Naturally, he voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting gay marriage, and naturally he voted against sex education in schools and allowing people with AIDS to have expanded access to Medicare.

According to the arresting officer, Senator Craig seemed quite familiar with the various signals men use when attempting to copulate within a toilet stall. Craig claims his gestures were misinterpreted, especially the “wide stance” he uses on the john.

Craig was outed last year by blogger Mike Rogers, and was supposedly under investigation over twenty years ago for molesting congressional pages. (Rogers has also outed family-values gays like Congressman Ed Schrock and Congressman David Dreier. )

This follows my absolute favorite sex scandal of the Right, in which Rep. Bob Allen claimed he was so afraid of black men that he offered to pay one for oral sex.

Understand that I don’t particularly care what people get up to in private. (Though I’m not sure whether “private” includes an airport toilet stall— can’t the Senator go to a seedy motel like other people?) I don’t care if the entire Senate is gay. And I’m not in love with the practice of outing public figures.

I’m not even terribly bothered by the hypocrisy. Politicians are hypocritical because the voters are hypocrites, and in order to get elected the politicians have to say what the voters want them to, even if the voters are stupid, ignorant, bigoted, and useless.

What really bothers me is the assumption of privilege. Dozens if not hundreds of people knew about Craig’s orientation, including the party insiders in his own state, and this was probably the case with Schrock and Dreier and Allen as well. Yet they all thought that because they were Privileged— because they were white and male and politically conservative and political insiders— that they could publically condemn people just like them, and still majestically float above the fray without being touched. Craig could dump truckloads of shit on others, but because of his assumption of privilege, he thought none of the shit would ever cling to him.

Well, kids, the shit is all over him now.

We close with Craig’s endorsement of Mitt Romney.

Knowing Governor Mitt Romney is knowing someone who, first and foremost, has very strong family values. That is something I grew up with and believe in.

Sounds kind of ironic now, doesn’t it?