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Second, you may be right that "the crime he was arrested for ought not be a crime." But that is not his actual defense. Rather, based on his past and current pronouncements, he wholeheartedly agrees that gay sex, or soliciting gay sex, in a men's room should be a crime. Instead, he denies engaging in the conduct that constitutes the crime. Shouldn't that affect your defense of him? HINT: the applicable word rhymes with chypocrisy.
Does your defense still stand?
Sorry. No manual will be forthcoming. There is no manual.
As one who writes in the public sphere about private matters, you should appreciate what I have to say.
Senator Craig's act of soliciting sex was nothing more than a private act, but it was done in a public place. That's what makes it wrong.
There is nothing wrong about sex between consenting adults. But, sex is normally conducted in private places, such as bedrooms, bars (initially), on the Internet, or within the confines of one's associates and friends. This doesn't matter if you are gay or straight or if you don't know the difference, as is apparently the case with Sen. Craig of Idaho.
It's ironic that a public servant, emphasis on public, chooses to risk his reputation by soliciting sex in a public place, such as in the bathroom stall at the Minneapolis airport. This is the "ick" factor that Mike Jones was so critically assaulted for. But Jones' sexual acts with Rev. Haggard were conducted privately, not publicly.
Nobody should care about private acts, but certain gay PhD's ( that's "professional homosexuals of Denver") like to blame Jones for the loss of the Domestic Partnership referendum last year. In fact, Jones' coming out and revelations actually helped the Democrats wrestle control from the Republicans.
So, don't feel bad about wasting your youth rehearsing pickup lines and gathering the nerve to approach a likely candidate for a liaison. I'm guessing that it was done within the confines of an appropriate spot, like a bar, or at a private party, or under a shady tree at college.
Gays - including the closet case, Sen. Craig - don't have quite that luxury, and they resort to bathroom liaisons. Craig is an un-healthy gay man, but you'll never convince him of that.
As to your defense, I didn't understand that you were offering a legal defense to the charges themselves. (Actually, Dan dearest, the court didn't charge him with anything. The prosecutor did that. I know, facts may be a small point to you.) So, you were offering a defense only to the crime with which he was convicted?.....even though, as you said, he offered no defense? And your defense is that, even though he performed the facts alleged (remember, he admitted them in court), those facts shouldn't constitute a crime. Fair enough. You are probably right. But, again, he offered no such defense.
But, the more reasonable interpretation of your initial post was a defense of Craig in the political arena, wherein hyprocrisy is relevant. I apologize for not understanding that you presented a purely legal argument (which was easy to do considering your apparent inabillity to comprehend a 3-page court document of the simplest variety).
Sen. Craig set this karmic exercise in motion years ago. Now its payback time for all the people his Puritan/Mormon policies have harmed over the years.
Why on EARTH would he plead guilty to fidgeting with his fingers (underneath the stall-wall, mind you), and tapping his toes? Makes no sense. Would YOU have plead guilty to this (remember, the charge was "disorderly conduct" What specific "conduct" WAS the good Senator pleading guilty to?
Also, you conveniently left out that the good Senator stared into the door crack of the police officer's stall for one to two MINUTES. Other stalls were open, so it wasn't to check to see if that one was open.
He rubbed his foot against the police officer's foot. Another point you left out. He also claimed to be "picking up a bit of paper" with his hand. The police officer states in his official writeup that there WAS NO PAPER THERE.
I'm not even gonna go into this "wide stance" garbage.
And why on EARTH would the good Senator keep something so trivial and INNOCENT from his own family?
A third-grader could come up with better denial's than the good Senator has. Hell, even Alberto Gonzales could.
I urge you to go and read the ENTIRE police report. You obviously haven't
Another point: When Kane wrote in the Wash Post on Tuesday, he mentioned that Lavvy was married and had 3 grown children. Sounds very hetro to me. However, Kane forgot to mention that the "children" are from his wife's former marriage, and carry none of his DNA! They are NOT his biological children! OOOOPS!!.
To Whipple: WAAAAAAAAAAAAA WAAAAAAAAAA Haaaaaa!!
It's NOT a serious refutation of Sen. Craig's behavior, for the record.
Craig is a hypocite of the worst kind and should be skewered with the likes of Haggard and Foley.
Whether or not it's a crime or should be a crime is a whole different debate. I think the State being able to prosecte on those facts is more dangerous and offensive than any pass made at me in a bathroom. A slippery slope for sure.
Because the Minneapolis/St Paul airport is a major international thoroughfare to the western US and hub for Northwest Airlines, there's a lot of passenger traffic. Apparently, the public restroom in question -- which I'm told is fairly secluded -- has a reputation for being a cruising location. That's why it was being staked out by the airport police.
Besides that, HE PLEAD GUILTY.
It feels great to see another scumbag lying douchebag get his due, and pound one more nail into the republican party coffin. I pray this guy runs in 2008.
The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all...
It's not a serious defense of Sen. Craig's behavior.
I completely understand your outrage at how the media missed this story -- see this analysis at our sister site, Minnesota Monitor.com -- but that's not a bone to pick here.
From TPM Reader TB ...
Dear Editors (here specifically David, and Josh):
Fine coverage, as always. I very much enjoy and appreciate your site.
Regarding Larry Craig's bathroom actions and American public sex in general: there are two comments I'd like to add to the discussion. First, male-male sex in public bathrooms has been going on in America for at least 100 years...probably since the invention of the public bathroom. Our culture's lack of understanding of sexuality, and our gender-segregated bathrooms, created an environment where males naturally happen upon each other in stages of undress (much like the locker room). Such scandalous behavior has been uncovered at YMCAs (originally built as boarding houses for World War I soldiers), park restrooms, and transit station restrooms since the early 20th century. Typically, men who had sex with each other in these restrooms were caught by plainclothes investigators who pretended to accept their suitors' advances (and, in some cases, were quite passionate about their ... investigations) before booking them. Long prison terms, psychiatric "treatment", and public humiliation were common outcomes of these investigations. For most of the 20th century, there were very, very few public places in most of America for men to meet each other. There was certainly no public space friendlier to gays in Boise, Idaho, than the library and park bathrooms when Sen. Craig was a young man. I call them preliminaries because they preface more intricate coded behavior that can indicate a variety of things: whose stall the contact will happen; what activities are amenable to either party; whether money will change hands; whether there is a lookout; whether the place itself is safe; and much more. "Tearooms," as these bathrooms are called, established an entire non-verbal dialectic to facilitate sexual union between American men. They are as enshrined in gay culture as Sunday afternoon "tea dances," or Bette Midler singing at the baths, or Stonewall, or, currently, Internet dating. Even for me, as a young gay man from Wisconsin curious about gay sex in the mid-1980s, the park restrooms were the place where it all happened. The restrooms were not just an urban legend: they were living history -- noisy, confusing, heady, stinky, and nervewracking places for a sexual -- and cultural -- initiation. The codes that Craig and his arresting officer used (looking through the stall door; tapping one's foot; touching your stall neighbor's foot) are historical preliminaries to sexual contact.
Which leads me to this: we do not live in the 1930s anymore, or even the 1980s. One can make the distinction now between furtive behavior and discreet behavior. There are lots of ways by which and places where men can meet other men to wine, dine, kiss, screw, get married, or just civilly unionize. It doesn't have to happen in the bathroom, unless that is what you choose. I feel some fondness for tearooms, where men would look at me, then just 18, like I was Ganymede come back to earth. There is an excitement and danger and kink to public sex that I still enjoy, in empty cemeteries on moonless nights with someone I like, offending only the dead. There are so many ways to meet someone and approximate the thrill of the tearooms. We could say that Sen. Craig was just unimaginative, or wouldn't have it any other way; I think he hadn't caught up with the ways gay culture has changed, and he didn't know how.
But it's never too late: if I were him, I'd be on Craig's list with a crotch shot and a "married, discreet" tag.
--Josh Marshall
But, among all of the guys who have found themselves in similar circumstances to his in June, Larry Craig was better equipped than most to stand up for himself and make his own case. He had the option to take the lead in June by making a public statement of the facts which allegedly contradicted the officer's report; he had the option to make the case that fidgeting in a bathroom should not be grounds for criminal charges, and the entrapment method was excessive.
He's in an understandably tough spot.
But, when push came to shove, he (a) hid from his family and the public, (b) used Clinton-esque denials, evading personal responsibility, (c) blamed the media, and (d) protested that he's not one of those gay men, inferring that they're the awful ones having sex in the bathrooms.
I empathize with him, but I don't trust the guy. I cant help suspecting that he would throw all men who have sex with men under a bus right now if it would save his political hide.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
Can you picture the exchange in rehab?
Sen. Craig: "Hey Mark, what say we hit the local airport?"
Foley: "Airport? Screw that. Let's go find us a boys dorm room."
Haggard: "You think they'll have any meth?"
Family Values, meet the Three Stooges.
I believe that you are 1- a stinking rabble rouser and 2- an ignorant fool.
Lets see- the sick individual is employed as only one of one hundred individuals whose job it is to RUN this country. Do you understand that? And- ya want ta know something?
he wasn't looking for and adult- he was looking for a piece of YOUNG MEAT! And that makes him one sick bastard.
Ya get it now? Don't buy the nonsense that he was looking for another man. The only thing stopping him is fear and ignorance. GET IT?
http://www.squirt.or...
Oh, wait! Look over here. There's a Democrate that's doing something wrong... (that's sarcastic - (oops! had to explain it.))
There's more than enough room on the interent to deal with all of our law-maker's wrong doings...
That wasn't original with me - but it did make me laugh - the only thing that did in this pathetic episode.
He stared through the crack in the door into the cop's bathroom stall for at least 2 minutes, long enough that he identified his blue eyes. Come on! He was quite obviously soliciting sex, which I could care less about if it wasn't for the blatant hypocrisy.
Basically, this is a very troubled man who is lying to himself and everyone else in his life. It's pathetic.
If you don't like the commentary, tough. But namecalling and personal disparagement won't change things. It just shows that you have no substantive answer to the point being made.
But don't let me stop you from entering baseless sarcasm and making strawman arguments.
Hope I bump into you at Mt. Olivet this Halloween!
That's what so sick about this It always has to be about right left. Never about right wrong. This is just flat out wrong!
Can't he sue on some constitutional grounds.
"No Sex in the restrooms, we monitor."
"GET A ROOM!"
If we could just quit being so uptight about small things. last time I checked this was the twenty first century. Treat people like adults and they just may respond as adults.
I wonder how much time the officer spends on this. I know we have better thing for them to do in our nations airports.
If the Senator is gay or not gay really doesn't matter. That's his business. If he was caught having sex in the bathroom then that would cross the line. Give him a ticket and publish it for public consumption. I think that's a good enough deterrent.
We should let him know that we will forgive him if he votes to end the war. That would be the American thing to do.
Peace.
It's not "Onion-style" satire, and it's not excruciatingly fact-based "Only-the-Truth-Is-Funny" Rick Reynolds-type satire. So the writer's crime is either not being nitty-picky fact-based, or not being outrageous enough to warrant his not being fact-based.