I just read the news about Senator Craig (True American is already delighting the anti-fundamentalists with this delicious information).
There are many ways to think about situations like this.
First, there is a deeply disturbed individual acting out something that cannot be integrated or fulfilled in his narrowly-constructed life.
Second, there are a lot of Republicans in these self-repressing cages, if recent arrests of a Florida Congressman, a Georgia State Republican officer, the head of the Indiana Young Republicans, and Mark Foley, constitute a trend. (These are just the ones that come to mind, I dimly recall others.)
Third, the charitable instincts of most people are blunted when they recall how viciously these same individuals pursued opponents in their political careers.
Foley engineered a truly horrible bill (that was Alberto Gonzales' favorite piece of legislation- according to his office) that purported to protect minors from internet porn, but which gave sweeping and unnecessary powers to the police and to special invewstigators.
Congressman Bob in Florida, responding to the hysteria of the Jessica Lunsford murder, introduced grand-standing measures that laid heavy punishments on misdemeanor convictions. I am not an advocate of public indecency, but exhibitionists are not serial rapists, and do not deserve life-long stigmatization and registration as violent sexual offenders. Interestingly, Congressman Bob will face the new "enhanced" penalties for propositioning a cop. It is stupid and pathetic, but it does not merit a felony conviction and registration as a sex offender.
Fourth, I believe that individuals of good will are exempt from showing charity to hypocrites who have lied, demeaned, and born false witness against their gay, lesbian, single, unwed, poor, or disadvantaged neighbors.
Senator Craig was a stern and uncompromising proponnent of harshness for every occassion. His slanders against single-person households, against gay and lesbian people, against the working poor, are inexcusable.
Fifth, Until the Democrats took control of the Senate, Craig was the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee subcommittees related to mining, agriculture, and natural resources in the west.
You want to know who permits unscrupulous idiots like Murray to do unsafe mining throughout the US, look first to Craig.
Interested in learning how mineral rights owned by the federal government are given away to big industrial donors? Look at Craig.
Thinking about who was protecting the most corrupt and self-aggrandizing Department of the Interior since James Watt? Look at Craig.
Wondering who might have looted billions out of the Bureau of Indian Affairs? Craig succeeded in shutting down inquiries.
Sixth, if environmental lobbyists had been on the ball about discovering what motivates Republicans like Craig, they would have stopped sending money, information, petitions, or proposals, and started sending Ted Haggerty's rent boy to visit.
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I believe that individuals of good will are exempt from showing charity to hypocrites who have lied, demeaned, and born false witness against their gay, lesbian, single, unwed, poor, or disadvantaged neighbors.
No more charity for these people. They don't deserve it and they use it to their already unfair, dishonest advantage. Enough!
I believe that this principle is compatible with the highest moral reasoning.
I discussed this with a close friend last night, after bouncing around several totally unrelated topics. She is someone whose opinion I respect very much, and I hated that several times over the last few years she had tried to convince me that I should approach the opposition with kindness and reasoning. She was traveling with a national level politician's campaign, and I understood that she had to represent him the way he wanted to represent himself. But it didn't work for me any more.
Last night, she agreed that kindness and reasonable discussion are not only lost on these hypocrites and their blind followers, granting them such only gives them more power to use against us. I believe that with all I am, and that we can't afford to give them another inch.
It is a wild and disorienting thing to meet the arguments of Jesus, without the cultural baggage that is loaded (some may be unavoidable, alas) upon them by all the folks who need some proof text to justify stupidity or protect the status quo.
Jesus was unrelenting with those who set a standard for others that they could not meet themselves.
It is the Lord who tells the Larry Craigs of this world that the bar they set for others is the bar by which they will be measured.
There was no "charity" (except, perhaps, the same fierce conviction that you voice, Sandy - that this is the only medicine that will cure the disease of self-righteousness)
in Jesus rebukes to the "Scribes and Pharisees" who made the same argument about those who struggled to "make it" that Larry Craig made.
Anything broken, humbled, sorrowful can be healed and made new -anything proud and self-righteous will be brought low.
Here endeth the lesson.
Thanks be to God
Not only Kris, there are other intelligent, honest, progressive people here. Please, step up and be the candidates we deserve.
WTF?!
Donna:
King Henry was venturing into unchartered territory about the scope of the authority and perogatives of the throne.
Britain has never had a written "constitution."
We DO!
We have a Constitution that this lying and conniving President believes he can ignore. (Not that I don't like your historical analogies! :-) )
Olga, you are absolutely right.
Whether certain kinds of individuals seek it out, or being an office-holder promotes it, the seperation of the "public" and the "personal" self seems pervasive in national life.
Research establishes clearly that individuals who are made fearful or anxious by characteristics of which they are ashamed, seek situations in which these characteristics are highly stigmatized and repressed -so they can experience the power of the group in banishing the unwanted attribute.
That is why it is, actually, often a symptom of health for repressed closet cases to do something dramatic like this.
Propositioning a cop may be an attempt to connect to a true, real, and valid emotion or sensation, or experience (although they will call it "unnatural", 'unhealthy", and "not really part of them" when caught).
If Craig or Ted Haggerty could say, "my life was not working for me. I did something naive and inexperienced in order to find what I was looking for, that did not work, but I am going to pursue who I am and what I love.... " they and their families would be much happier folks.
I hope that Kris does not have to move.
So are we to assume that the lewd act in question is either weenie waving or unsolicited comparison? I'm not sure what the parameters are for normal men's restroom behavior...
What we need now is an article exposing the mountaintop destruction in West Virginia. If you haven't heard of this, it's because they don't want to be stopped and they have cloaked the stories: coal companies are blasting off the tops of mountains to access the coal beneath. Whole mountains are gone, for greed and profit. Worth investigating -- I wonder how much Craig has to do with this; I suspect a great deal.
Grrrrrr.
The official varmint is entirely correct - the long history of exploitive mineral extraction leaves the area with a false economy entirely dependent on a single industry that thereby gains approval for any destructive thing it seeks to do.
The unfortuante thing is that Bush is likely to hand out all kinds of "favors" to the worst American companies on his way to history's dustbin.
Bush is consigned to the toxic waste dump of history.
Brava, Kris!
That's all I can say for now. You guys have said it all.
I have been scratching my head on this topic. It really seems counter-intuitive, but maybe not. Maybe humans are just weird with the way they channel their self hatred and their denial.
Chris, I do not know of any anti-gay crusaders who are not closet cases. My favorites were the two young right wing zealots from the Washington DC area who wrote lurid accounts of what occurred in gay clubs.
Of course, their "research" required them to vist bars, bathhouses, and bookstores, just about every night of the week. Anything for "family values."
There have been whispers about Craig and cocaine and Craig and sex with males for years. The usual chutzpah of the moralists as "victims" extends to claiming there is a "witch hunt"--in the very city in which there was one of the most extensive witch hunts for homosexuality, Boise, Idaho.
Lindsey Graham carries himself like a prissy little smartypants, so I would not be surprised at innuendo about his lack of machismo. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
He can't be a happy man.
Peter, that has to be my favorite line in the whole article!
It sounds, once again, like a case of "He doth protest too much"
Isn't it almost always the ones who make the biggest noise the same ones who
commit the most egregious offenses?
Kris, how do you think I feel when all of Shrub's resigning buddies end up in Texas!
I hate moving...
I feel your pain. Texas is a big state, but it must still suck to live "next door" to the Roves, the Meirs, and the Gozales clans.
You and Lydia are the only Texans with whom I correspond regularly.
Tony Snow doesn't live in Texas does he?
That would make another smarmy liar for the neighborhood.
I have, I'm afraid, minimal tolerance for hypocrisy in any case.
I often wonder why all these individuals who spout hatred and fear, intolerance and suspicion, who are dishonest and clearly self-serving are surprised when the world regards their downfalls with disdain.
Learn a lesson from "It's a Wonderful Life" - what goes around and comes around. It's easy to forgive human foibles in people who treat others with respect and tolerance.
Odd, isn't it, how much less likely such people are to have truly unsavory foibles.
Listening to 'Talk of The Nation' today it appears that this happened in May and when it went to court Craig plead guilty... now he claims he 'misunderstood' what he was being charged with...
The more the man talks the deeper the hole he digs for himself!
Stephanie B,
I know that there is a link between the harshness of these conservative values people, and the degree to which they were trying to repress their own impulses and desires, but the hypocrisy still rankles and invites one to celebrate their pathetic downfalls.
Kathleen, I think Mark McClellen (he is a doctor) is the head of CMS - although he may become quite uncomfortable if the Congress ever gets around to looking at the details of the prescription benefit contracting process.
But, you do still another family of political hacks who have been raised to positions way beyond their expertise. It is a ahame that the AWOL in Chief did not have a larger circle of friends.
Isn't it always the queer? They lie. Look at the former governor of New Jersey. He had a sex buddy on the states payroll.
When do we start asking why Queers are so deviant and so adapted to being bold faced liars? It happens with democrats, republicans, and religion. The one common denominator to every case is that the perp is a queer.
People who keep secrets act in furtive, weird, and dangerous ways.
Most gay and lesbian people in this country are holding jobs, participating in relationships, raising kids, and paying taxes.
They aren't sneaking around in the dark.
It is the angry, guilty, secret-keeping closet cases who are cruising around for some
quick action on the down low.
People who are open and secure about their sexual orientation are not lying and are not hiding and not doing stupid things. They are also not lying and making things up about the sexual habits of their fellow citizens.
The ones who are caught doing stupid and illegal things are the ones who have been keeping secrets. That is why "coming out" is critical to the health of gay people, and why they have become so successful in entering the mainstream so quickly -they stop hiding.
As long as the Republican Party pretends to be the party of virtue, and relies on the votes of anxious, insecure, uneducated voters who can be fooled about their lies about gay folks, the GOP is also going to have a huge number of closet cases doing wierd things.
There are closeted Democrats, and Democrats who commit stupid sex acts, but the Party as a whole is more accepting of gay and lesbian folks, so fewer people are hiding and compensating for their guilt by lashing out at others.
Jim McGreevy, governor of New Jersey, resigned in the scandal over his political patronage of the lover.
There was not as much joke-making about him as there is about Larry Craig, not because McGreevy is a Democrat, but because McGreevy did not make a career out of being holier than thou.
That is the part that you never get, Jeff. You think that is is partisan republican bashing, when it is hypocrite bashing.
Craig is a tortured soul who compensates for his guilty secrets by a taking a very harsh position against sexual minorities, including lying about them.
Very much like you do routinely, Jeff.
That is why you are often called out as a closet case, because you fit the pattern so well.
People who are dissatisfied, who feel like the world owes them more or that they aren't getting the attention they need or because they have emotions or tendencies they aren't comfortable with, they are much more likely to judge, to repress, to stigmatize others, particularly those who embody any emotions they are uncomfortable with. After all, they think, if I can't do it, no one should be able to. Sadly, huge swaths of violence, injustice and tragedy historically can be traced to this kind of thinking, this kind of close-mindedness.
I'm not zeroing in on Republicans, though there are certainly some who qualify. My point is those that preach hatred, fear, repression and intolerance are NEVER on the side of good. So, when something happens that reveals that inner rot in one of that crowd, I, and others like me, are not surprised.
The outrage is because a guy who says gays are evil and corrupt, is out looking for some sleazy gay sex in public bathrooms.
He is going to lose his job, not because he is a corrupt self-righteous Republican, but because the whole nation is laughing at a harsh moralist who uses his alleged values as a cover for his low-life activity.
I have no idea how Larry Craig organized his religious beliefs with the hateful and deceitful things he said about gay and lesbian folks (also, the poor and the needy, too).
I also believe that police entrapment in public restrooms is a huge con game - there was no crime committed in Minneapolis.
So, if there are going to be fundamentally unjust law "enforcemetn" activities, it is fitting that they entrap only hypocrites and haters.
Agreed, Peter, about the entrapment. It is pure nonsense that he was breaking the law here. By admitting to a misdemeanor, the police officer pulled a real fast one on him. I believe that was the point. It is entirely possible that Craig did nothing wrong in that restroom. We'll never know because what happened is only known by the two men. Whatever his sexuality, it is wrong for the police to be conducting surveillance in public restrooms.
By his own admission, he was sitting in the john for "hours" waiting for someone to shuffle his feet.
I believe that Craig was looking for sex; the accounts of his adventures at Union Station in Washigton and elsewhere ring true.
But, he never even propositioned the officer.
I believe the illegality entirely depends upon the reaching his hand under the stall.
It is stupid and sleazy (not that there is anything wrong with that), but not a crime.
That is the pitfall of being a closeted, self-hating guy who likes guys.
If you are going to be thoughtful, prudent, and decent - you have can't be living a lie.