Sheesh. This Larry Craig men’s room arrest thing just goes on and on. I was at the gym tonight and CNN was wall-to-wall panel discussions. Much of the discussion was inside baseball (how much will this hurt/help Republicans/Democrats) but every now and then a panelist, grasping for anything else to say, would pipe up about the hypocrisy issue of a gay anti-gay lawmaker.

If the story won’t go away, and if people are going to persist in talking about the hypocrisy angle, I guess it’s ok for me to post a reminder that the scandal isn’t the hypocrisy, it’s the policy! Hypocrites are a dime a dozen. So, unfortunately, are crappy, unworkable, often punitive or vindictive laws. There’s probably not a whole lot we can do about the former but there’s no excuse for the latter.

Consider: Larry Craig voted for a constitutional ban of same-sex marriage, against adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes, against expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation, for prohibiting same-sex marriage, in favor of job discrimination for sexual orientation, and as a state legislator against anything resembling civil unions. Craig also belonged to numerous “family values” groups, spoke vociferously on those issues, campaigned hard as a standard bearer of those values.

And yet…

And yet…

Despite all that, despite all his good will, all his exhaustive campaigning, all his research, all the testimony he heard, all the bills he voted for, all the money he raised for anti-gay groups…

Despite all that he continued to engage in homosexual behavior.

Worse, he engaged in the stereotypically creepy men’s-room cruising that he and most of his supporters find most alarming about homosexual behavior.

So…

Is his personal hypocrisy the scandal or is it the didn’t-even-work-for-him-even-though-he-wrote-them policies he’s spent his career advocating? (Clue: if you think it’s his hypocrisy you haven’t been paying attention.)

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I might add that there’s another Craig-related scandal at the policy level that I alluded to in previous post: if he, like so many of his conservative colleagues, is a covert, closet homosexual then the “family values” policies he’s been advocating are utter fiction.

Think about turning the tables — imagine even a well-meaning heterosexual trying to create policies that promoted homosexuality. With no experience, and perhaps compounded by good-will-driven efforts to “pass” for homosexual himself, you wouldn’t expect him to make proposals that actually accorded with issues that are most important to, let alone most beneficial to, real homosexuals. Such a clueless cheerleader might propose making purses available for gay men because, he might assume, all gay men are transvestites. Such a wannabe do-gooder might propose earmarks for grants to recognize “lisp-bonics” as a “legitimate” dialect!

In other words, he might merely attempt to legislate to the most extreme stereotypes without ever recognizing that…

well…

most homosexual men don’t cross dress, don’t mince and dish, aren’t fussy hairdressers or interior decorators, and don’t otherwise conform to heterosexually-generated stereotypes about them…

any more than most heterosexual men sit around in locker-rooms adjusting their balls nor stand around golf courses wearing mixed-plaid golf caps nor pissing in their Depends at the prospect that someone they know might be “a little light in the loafers.” Update: Or worrying that if their daughters got the same pay as their sons they’d never see grandchildren, etc., etc., etc.

Turning the world back upright again that’s exactly the sort of thing Craig, and Haggard, Allen, and Jim West or (from the chastity/fidelity/probity side) Vitter and Giuliani and McCain and Laura Schlessinger have tried to foist on real straight people. Update: Joe Conanson of Salon.com has a more extensive list dating back to the McCarthy era’s Roy Cohn. Mike Rogers of BlogActive is keeping the list more than current. (He’s the gay activist who broke the story of Craig’s arrest, among other outings of closeted gay Republicans who vote anti-gay.)

Again, it’s not their personal hypocrisy that’s a problem. It’s the clueless, whole-cloth-fiction-based policies they try to foist off on the rest of us — normal heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, trans- inter- and asexuals — in hopes we’ll mistake them for “one of us.”

Thanks but no thanks.

@#$!@!~@%