There has been something rather unseemly about the glee with which my fellow liberals and leftists have met the fall of Larry Craig and other Republican hypocrites.
Yes, Sen. Craig, U.S. Rep. David Vitter and others did make their political career out of bashing the very behavior for which they are now getting a very public comeuppance. (Tom Tomorrow offers the best take on the entire run of affairs.)
But the level of glee is downright scary in that it resembles nothing so much as the rabid attacks that Newt Gingrich and the GOP made against Bill Clinton during Monica-gate and the impeachment proceedings.
Here is the piece (by Sandip Roy) we all should be reading.
So adding that up, all I can get is Craig might have wanted to have sex with Karsnia. Perhaps right there in the bathroom. Perhaps in a hotel room somewhere. And that is what McConnell calls “unforgivable.”
If one person hitting on another person in a public place is a crime, then every singles bar in the country on a Friday night is a hot spot of unforgivable crimes. It is America’s stunning prudery that just the thought of having, the desire to have, (gay) sex has been criminalized, so that this man was blackballed, ostracized and forced to resign.
Hmmm. That seems to be the point. The hypocrisy is palpable — the closeted homosexual using his public position to oppress homosexuals even as he maybe seeking surreptitious sex on the sly — but it is rather human.
If every politician was chased from office for his hypocrisy, then there would be few politicians in office.
More from Roy:
Larry Craig, homophobe on the Senate floor, is dying a death of a thousand cuts by homophobia disguised as nonjudgmental fairness.
Gay activists are rejoicing at the fall of another homophobe, hoisted on his own petard, tripping over the skeleton in his own toilet stall. Activist Michelangelo Signorile, who has defended the “outing” of antigay closeted public figures, said in Newsweek, “For me, this is all about journalism and equalizing the reporting of homosexuality and heterosexuality.”
But if there is a case of a radical discrepancy in how homosexual sex and heterosexual sex are treated by the media, it is Larry Craig vs. David Vitter. And while it’s always gratifying when a hypocrite gets his comeuppance, it’s tragic that those activists rubbing their hands in schadenfreude didn’t stop to note that gross
inequality.This is not about the right to have sex in a public place. Craig is being sacrificed for the mere act of perhaps wanting to have sex. Nothing more. And that will come to haunt us all long after we have forgotten the unfortunate senator from Idaho.
Perhaps it is not just folks like Craig and Ted Haggard and other Republicans who are hypocrites. Maybe, just maybe, our glee at their demise is an indication that the left and the rest of America might suffer from a bit of hypocrisy, as well.
Food for thought.
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Hank Kalet 