The Larry Schiavo Case, Continued

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive! (Sir Walter Scott, Marmion)


As I was saying. . .

Thanks to trainmaster Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) and subtle signals from CNN, the public’s attention is moving away from Craig qua criminal sex perv (and I don't mean the gay part) to Craig qua victim of his own party’s twisted leadership.

Just last week, Craig was the perp: a sleazy, hypocritical, and media-challenged sex perv. Now he is morphing into twice a victim -- of what is being pushed now as a purported “sex sting” (see CNN’s crawl line) and of a meanly, even rabidly homophobic Republican leadership.

If this isn’t a case of the hoisting petard, I don’t know what is.

Specter’s role -- suggesting that Craig is being "railroaded"and urging him to fight back -- in a way reprises his performance in 1991 in the infamous Clarence Thomas nomination hearings. Although Specter hasn’t yet begun to fight, and the direction of his attack is reversed now (Specter has his own party’s leadership in his sights), it’s clear that Specter still knows how to make a train wreck.

What’s baffling is that neither Specter nor Craig seems to care much about the impact of the Craig case on the Republican party. Well, in Craig’s case, not so baffling. But in Specter’s, what’s the deal? Circle the wagons and fire?

This belated attempt at resurrection will do more than keep Craig’s sleazy behavior qua Republican on our minds. It will also help us again to see the Republican leadership for what it truly is: a waspish hive of inquisitors that’s just oh-so willing to pimp anybody and anything for its own political self-interest. It's about everybody's morals but their own.

This, after all, is the same crowd (absent Dr. Frist, The Long-Distance Diagnoser) that gave itself the vapors and Congress a huge black eye over the Terry Schiavo tragedy.

In the end, ironically, Craig will still have done whatever it was that he did in the airport toilet (me, I'm going with the cop on this one). Soon, either he’ll be the born-again sitting senator from Idaho or he'll be the former senator from Idaho, but he’ll always be the hypocritical, cowardly, and homophobic Republican senator from Idaho with at least one big, fat, sleazzzy sex stain on his record.

And in the end, the GOP will be what it has been for twenty years or more: a mean, manipulative, hypocritical, narrow-minded, misguided, greedy, corrupt, posturing, wasteful, expensive, lying, and very dangerous mess. Other than that, hey, what more could you want?

This Specter-initiated Craig flip-flop isn’t going to fool, or change the fundamentals for anybody.

The Larry Schiavo Case

AKA Larry Craig.

If you read this blog, you know I’m not crazy about Senator Larry Craig. He's coming across to me as a selfish liar who has deceived his family, his lovers, his friends, his constituents, and of course himself.

It seems that he has so compartmentalized his sexuality from his consciousness and conscience that he actually may not believe he’s done anything wrong, except pleading guilty. As the awful tape-recording reveals, in Craig's head, if anybody was giving hand signals, it wasn’t Mr. Wide Stance. No nasty boys here.

Now comes news that the psychodrama has only just begun. Larry Craig may not resign after all. Big surprise. I heard the words “intend to” on Saturday, and knew then that he had given himself an out. It was clear then that the story wasn’t done yet.

This decision shifts the country’s focus from Craig to the Republican leadership. None of this could occur were it not for (a) Craig's truly unnerving capacity to split off his attraction to men, and (b) trainmaster Arlen Specter. More shortly.

Consequences

OK, on a more serious note, the Craig deal is about the closet.

As Maj. Darryl Tolleson of the Atlanta Police said this week on CNN, the majority of men his officers catch pursuing bathroom sex are “family men.” But Tolleson juxtaposed “family men” against “gay” men, as if one were animal and the other vegetable.

Guess the Major didn’t get the note in the bottle. Many gay men are married, with children. They, like Craig, may be bisexual or gay, and are in the closet. Their options for sexual gratification are limited because the risks of being outed are overwhelmingly frightening. So frightening, in fact, that some don’t even think of themselves as gay.

Hard to understand? When people are defined in law, religion, and society as dirty, wicked, and diseased, denial might seem necessary. It might even seem reasonable.

The consequences for coming out don’t usually involve death, but they aren’t a walk in the park, either. For teens and young adults, they include expulsion from the family, loss of financial security, social ostracism, harassment, physical violence, and for those who come from conservative religious faiths, just coming out to self can be impossible.

This may be where Craig is coming from. If so, I feel sad for him, but I don’t excuse him.

It takes guts to come out, and especially for those who live within the Bible bubble, it takes a profound leap of faith. It takes the conviction that nothing can separate you from the love of God. It takes willingness to risk the loss of everything important and even necessary to your welfare, and implicitly, the conviction that you can survive all that. Such people are brave indeed. Such people are heroes.

But people like Craig chose a different path, preferring denial over acknowledgment; social security, career, and reputation over authenticity. They chose to risk the wellbeing of others – lovers, wives, and children – to sustain their fabrication. They chose, as well, to believe that the costs they themselves would face in coming out were always greater than the costs confronting others just like themselves, and then they chose to advantage themselves at the expense of people just like them. In Craig’s case, the betrayal goes one giant step further: He could, and did, help to enact laws to oppress people just like him. There's neither integrity nor courage nor compassion here.

Everything here – everything he’s done – goes back to the cruel propaganda and the fear that drove him into the closet and kept him there. If his duplicity hurts the Republican party, if his hypocrisy confounds and divides the “social conservatives” and is a factor in their descent from power, well, I figure it’s a form of Karma. Judgments, actions, and choices have consequences for family, friends, political parties, and countries.

Self-serving hypocrisy and a career-long habit of denying authenticity to his loved ones and perfect access to the sustenance of our Constitution and Bill of Rights to those he represents, have consequences.

Craig Crisis Sum-Up

Let's just cut to the chase:

In a belated discovery that the Roy Cohn Defense* does not work, Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) announced his retirement, saying, "I have decided not to seek re-election in order to spend more time with my very, very, very, very, very heterosexual family."

*"I'm not gay. I just like to have sex with other men."

He's Nuts!

I’m listening to Idaho Republican Senatory Larry Craig. Besides repeating the STOOPIT mistake all Republicans make--denying instead of admitting, apologizing, and moving on--I think he’s manifesting a whole new form of Hysterical Homophobic Dementia (HHD).

From the press conference (say what?):

(1) He overreacted and pleaded guilty to the crime of making a gay sex overture because he was stressed by the Idaho Statesman’s calling him gay?

(2) There’s a cloud over Idaho?

(3) He's sure the issue is not over yet? Does this mean he hopes it won't go away?

(4) Now he’s going to retain a lawyer?

(5) He’s not gay and never has been?

As we say in Chihuahua, no es el sense.

That was, undoubtedly, the worst press conference I've ever seen in my total life.

Oh Larry, Larry, Larry!

Rumors circulated about Mark Foley for years, and rumors have been circulating about Larry Craig for years, too. There's not always fire, but when there's this much smoke. . . .

It's not just the hypocrisy. It's the stoooooopidity, too. It's like Republicans are issued Stoopit permits at puberty. That must be it, because this happens to them so often that I'm getting bored with it. Now I'm just waiting for him to deny, deny, deny--which, as he would know if he weren't so stooopit, just sets up Act II.

Bye. Rushing out to see if Fox is calling Craig a Democrat.