|
It was the day we had all been waiting for, a day when the man who may well have been the worst Attorney General in United States history finally decided to resign. It was an event that many people across the blogosphere worked tirelessly to make happen, and after months of hard work they were finally seeing a major victory.
Of course their work was far from over, while Gonzalez was about to leave office he still had not been charged for any of the crimes he committed while in office. There was still a great deal of evidence yet to be uncovered in the scandals that ultimately brought him down, and Bush was about to appoint a new Attorney General that would no doubt do everything in their power to make sure that evidence was not uncovered.
It looked like the blogosphere was going to have a very important focus over the next few weeks, but then something happened. Just a few short hours after Gonzalez announced his resignation it was revealed that Larry Craig was a hypocrite. Actually I take that back, Larry Craig was revealed as a hypocrite long before he ever entered that bathroom but now people were finally talking about him being a hypocrite. But now we had a sex scandal on our hands. Maybe it was a sex scandal that did not even involve any actual sex but it was a sex scandal nonetheless, and so all the important news about Gonzalez’s long awaited resignation got buried underneath talks about what it really meant when a person tapped their foot in a bathroom.
Now it should be noted that Craig got arrested and then pled guilty in court weeks before we actually heard about it, but we are supposed to believe the news about him just happened to get released on the same day as Gonzalez’s resignation by mere coincidence. Was it a coincidence though, or was Craig merely the Republican’s sacrificial lamb?
Let us look at who this case ultimately divided the most.
The Republicans certainly were not divided, they pounced on Craig. Several Republicans called for his resignation, and I don’t think I heard a single one stand up to defend him. They knew that Idaho is a deep red state with a Republican governor who would gladly replace him with another far-right Republican hypocrite. They were able to get rid of Craig and make it appear as if they were taking the moral high ground and getting rid of those members who commit wrongdoing. We have all heard the Republican talking point in which they claim that “unlike Democrats our representatives resign when they commit wrong doing.” Of course this talking point is false, because if it were true Bush would have resigned long ago along with a whole bunch of other Republicans. But despite the fact that the talking point is false this incident gives them another example to make the talking point appear to be true, and ultimately that could benefit the Republicans. They will be able to take a lemon and make lemonade with it, and by the time the elections roll around they will be more likely to gain votes as a result of the way they handled the Craig incident than they will be to lose votes over someone who was shooed out of the party.
On our side however it was a different story. Of course we all believed Craig was a hypocrite, but there was a great deal of disagreement over how his case was handled. There are a number of us who are aware of the unfair treatment gays have received over the years, and the idea that we had undercover cops patrolling our bathrooms looking for gay men made us very nervous. I was among this group, and for this reason I stood up along with several others to defend Craig from some of the attacks he was taking. We were defending him for the same reason the ACLU has defended Nazis in the past. We may disagree with the man on pretty much everything, but once you allow the violation of one person’s rights you open the door to the violation of the rights of others.
Now naturally there were a good number of people on the left who had a different take on the situation. Craig was a hypocrite no doubt, and it can be very difficult to have sympathy for a person like him. And of course no one likes the idea of walking into a bathroom and catching people having sex in the stall, so there were some legitimate concerns.
We had a split among those on the left as to how well this case was handled, and the murky details of the police report did not do much to help resolve that split. While Craig’s story did not seem believable, it also did not seem believable that the police officer was merely a neutral observer in this incident, yet we have very little information on what that officer was doing in his stall. There was no real evidence that Craig made the first move, and many of us who are aware of the ways police have set people up in the past were hesitant to give an undercover police officer who was trying to arrest people for this very thing the benefit of the doubt. Others of course had a hard time giving a Republican hypocrite like Craig the benefit of the doubt.
And so what did we do? We tore each other apart of course. Those of us who defended Craig were accused of supporting bathroom sex and other perverted behavior, we were called trolls and worse and it seemed that people were unwilling to acknowledge legitimate concerns about how police actions like this could be used inappropriately.
On the other hand I heard a good number of Craig’s critics being accused of homophobia. Now maybe a few of those critics were homophobic, but no doubt when accusations of homophobia get thrown around so quickly many innocent people get the label tagged on them unfairly.
The bottom line is that while the Republicans were united against Craig, we were having nasty arguments. Some of those arguments may have been necessary as gay rights is a very important issue, but those arguments could have been conducted in a much more civil manner. Of course when the subject in question is a vile person like Larry Craig it can understandably be very difficult to remain civil sometimes.
Because of that lack of civility however we came out of this incident far more damaged than the Republicans were, even though it was their Senator that was in trouble.
There are lessons to be learned here. First we need to do a better job of respecting one another’s opinions. Just because some of us are not willing to call Craig a criminal for this particular incident does not mean we are perverts who support bathroom sex, and it does not mean we support his hypocrisy. We are simply people who are concerned because we know that the gay community has been treated unfairly on far too many occasions and we don’t want to defend an unfair justice system no matter who is the victim of that justice system. On the other hand not everyone who cracks a joke about Craig is homophobic, while there are serious problems with homophobia we need to recognize that whenever there is a sex scandal there will be jokes about that scandal whether it involves gays or heterosexuals. We have to be careful about throwing around the homophobia label too much because sometimes people who mean no harm get hit with that label and it can be very hurtful to them.
The second thing we need to remember is just as important. We need to remember that our media often plants stories as a distraction, and just because that story may target a Republican it does not necessarily mean that the story is not meant to distract us from the real issues. As a community we really dropped the Gonzalez story way too quickly to focus on this one, despite the fact that no matter what way you look at it Gonzalez’s crimes were far more severe than Craig’s.
Now I will be the first to admit that I love to jump on the Republicans for their sexual morality crap. I write satire quite often, and when the Republicans make sexual morality a key campaign issue and then proceed to engage in bizarre sex acts themselves it can be a great gift for those of us who write satire. I am still joking about Jerry Falwell’s comments on the Teletubbies, and those comments were made how many years ago?
But while these types of incidents are fun to use to show Republican hypocrisy, we need to draw a line between what we joke about and what we take seriously. While the topic of gay rights is a very important issue, the story of Craig’s bathroom incident as an individual matter does not even register on the list of important topics that we need to be engaged in serious discussion about. An issue we can joke about to expose hypocrisy sure, but an issue that seriously effects our lives it is not. No, Larry Craig is not going to start hitting on you the next time you walk into a bathroom, and he is not going to expose himself to your children either. He was a serious threat in the Senate, but he is not a serious threat to our bathrooms. If you want to focus on his crimes, focus on his real crimes and those crimes were committed under the dome of the Capital building not in the Minneapolis airport.
In the future we must be careful to never lose sight of the real scandals, and those scandals usually do not involve sex.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
