Craig's in Closet, Republicans in the Dark

Just as it's never the heat, it's the humidity, it's rarely the charge itself, but the hypocrisy it reveals that does a politician in.

If Senator Larry Craig weren't a supporter of the Defense of Marriage Act, which seeks to guard the institution against people like himself, he might survive his guilty plea to disorderly conduct in a toilet at the Minneapolis airport.

At a press conference yesterday, a day after his plea became public, Craig denied everything. With his wife at his side, he defiantly said it was all a terrible misunderstanding, his plea the result of having endured a witch hunt by a local newspaper. He also said he would keep to his timetable to announce his re-election plans in the fall. It's hard to see how he hangs on. After all, his party hates people like him.

In its way, Craig's situation isn't only an instance of hypocrisy but tragedy, much more so than the case of former Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican who pursued the friendship of underage congressional pages, which is reprehensible and a crime if acted on.

Being homosexual isn't a crime. If the three-term Idaho senator didn't belong to a political party that makes homosexuality an evil to be stamped out, or a matter to be discriminated against, he might not have found himself in a public toilet trolling for a moment of human contact.

Read the whole column here.