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Same SexLarry Craig's anti-gay hypocrisy.

By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007, at 4:00 PM ET
Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Click image to expand.

If Larry Craig were held to the standard of sexual conduct he imposes on the U.S. armed forces, he'd be out of his job.

Fourteen years ago, in his first term as a Republican senator from Idaho, Craig helped to enact the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. It stipulates:

A member of the armed forces shall be separated from the armed forces under regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense if one or more of the following findings is made and approved in accordance with procedures set forth in such regulations: (1) That the member has engaged in, attempted to engage in, or solicited another to engage in a homosexual act or acts unless there are further findings … that the member has demonstrated that—(A) such conduct is a departure from the member's usual and customary behavior; (B) such conduct, under all the circumstances, is unlikely to recur; … [and] the member does not have a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts.

The policy reappears verbatim in the U.S. Code and in regulations of the armed services. The Air Force, for instance, says any airman will be discharged if he "has engaged in, attempted to engage in, or solicited another to engage in a homosexual act."

According to the report filed by the officer who arrested Craig at the Minneapolis airport in June, Craig stood outside the officer's bathroom stall for two minutes, repeatedly looked at the officer "through the crack in the door," sat in the stall next to the officer, tapped his foot, and gradually "moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot … within my stall area." Craig proceeded to "swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds" three times, palm up, using the hand farthest from that side of Craig's stall. Most of these gestures, the officer explained, were known pickup signals in a room known (and hence under surveillance for) public sex. When the officer took Craig outside and told him so, Craig claimed he had been reaching down with his hand to retrieve a piece of paper from the floor. The officer wrote that no such paper had been on the floor.

Two months later, Craig signed a plea agreement stating that he had "reviewed the arrest report" and that "in the restroom," he had "engaged in conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment." Officially, the charge to which he pleaded guilty was disorderly conduct.

I feel sorry for Craig. I hate the idea of cops going into bathrooms and busting people for coded gestures of interest. I'd rather live, let live, and tell the guy waving his hand under the stall to buzz off. But that's not the standard Craig applies to others. Any gay soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine who admitted to doing what Craig has admitted would, at a minimum, lose his job for violating DADT. In fact, many have been kicked out for less.

Most people think "don't ask, don't tell" means that if you don't announce that you're gay, you can keep your job. It should mean that. But in practice, if you don't tell, the military can—and often does—investigate and interrogate you until you're forced to tell.

Margaret Witt, a major in the Air Force Reserve, is in the process of being discharged for lesbianism. How did investigators find out she was gay? An anonymous tip. They tracked down her former partner, a civilian, and got the woman to admit that she and Witt had lived together. When they interrogated Witt, she confessed. If she hadn't, they could have prosecuted her for "false official statements" and imprisoned her for five years. Last fall, a federal judge conceded that Witt had "served her country faithfully and with distinction" and "did not draw attention to her sexual orientation." Nevertheless, he concluded, she had no constitutional grounds to contest her discharge. If you don't tell, they make you tell.

Six years ago, the Army kicked out Alex Nicholson, an interrogator, under DADT. How did he disclose his homosexuality? He mentioned it in a letter to a friend—in Portuguese. A colleague found the letter, translated it, and outed him. "Nobody asked me if I was gay and I wasn't telling anyone," says Nicholson. "You would think that a private letter that you had written in a foreign language would be sufficiently safe." But you would be wrong.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
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Remarks from the Fray:

What bothers me the most about these things is that the willingness to roast elected officials on personal foibles that contradict public positions seems like political extortion.

For instance, if Ted Kennedy were caught recklessly discharging an illegal gun in Massachusetts, (a state with draconian gun control laws) would we really expect him to vote against the assault weapons ban?

I should hope not, since a big majority of his constituents would strongly support it. So is it OK for the NRA to threaten to expose his arrest to pressure his vote? Is he a hypocrite?

The votes of Sen. Craig should rightly represent the sentiments of his conservative Idaho constituents, and public positions do not translate into personal hypocrisy. To imply, as Saletan has, that public positions should be taken only correlation with personal behavior is simply foolish.

--Reprobate

(To reply, click here.)

Observers in the media have simplistically concluded that Senator Craig must be some sort of a hypocrite, just because he's a secretly gay man who's devoted his entire political career to attacking and undermining the interests of gay people.

In public, Senator Craig denounced gay Americans as a gang of costumed degenerates passing themselves off as decentpeople. Moral lepers, under a foul sexual compulsion that dooms them to shuffle mindlessly from one public toilet to another, anonymously sodomizing one another and thus raining down a catraract of vile, incurable, agonizingly fatal diseases down on the heads of their innocent and unsuspecting wives.

And in private? Well, in private the man lived exactly the kind of sleazy, risky, dishonest, disreputable lifestyle that he accused the broader gay population of participating in when he was out in public. Small wonder the man despised gay people, if he thought that the entire gay population was like him.

--Thrasymachus

(To reply, click here.)

What's really a shame, is that the reaction of conservatives in and out of Idaho seem to be as concerned with what he is as with what he did. And while liberals, progressives and Democrats can enjoy from the sidelines as the GOP continues its slow implosion due to yet still another Conservative/Republican sex scandal, the Larry Craig chapter should present a prime opportunity to highlight the essential difference in the progressive and conservative visions regarding homosexuality.

On the right hand, you have the culture of shame, sham marriages, anonymous bathroom stall sex, male prostitutes (in the White House press room or local Megachurch), and page/choirboy molesters.

On the left hand, you have healthy adult relationships and a culture of love and acceptance. Families, parents, friends, neighbors, coworkers and soldiers serving their nation proudly.

In a sufficiently gay-friendly culture, Larry Craig and Ted Haggart might have come out and met nice young men and spared their spouses, children, constituents and congregation, and themselves, the pain and aggravation of living a lie and having the facade fall apart.

Frankly, the left has the superior vision here, and should use the Craig incident as the springboard to articulate that love, openness and acceptance are loftier principles than shame, lies and hate.

--LastManOnEarth

(To reply, click here.)

Saletan speaks of Sen. Craig's hypocrisy in supporting "don't ask, don't tell" and his other presumed principled stands against gay rights. I suppose I agree, but even that isn't what bothers me most about this episode. I find dishonor in the Senator's conduct, not merely for the how it throws open the disparity and the hypocrisy between his stated political beliefs and his personal behavior, but mainly because when his behavior became public, he could not find the courage to acknowledge it and apologize, to his family and his constituents. He may yet find that courage, I'm sure it's not easy. But to me, that failure to own up has been what's most objectionable in his behavior.

--Steve-R

(To reply, click here.)

The logic is here is elementary, not complex. Craig could be described as a hypocrite if he has come out strongly against (a) cheating on your spouse (he is guilty of that) or (b) gay sex in public bathrooms (he is guilty of trying to do that). Saletan is smart enough to understand that. Larry Craig is guilty of stupidity (e.g., lying to a police officer) and immorality (e.g., attempting to be unfaithful to his wife), but not hypocrisy.

--Engram

(To reply, click here.)

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