IGF CultureWatch

Jim West, Jim McGreevey, Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Bob Allen, David Vitter. Now Larry Craig.

Public figures' getting caught with their pants down is nothing new. What is new is a high-tech culture that makes exposure likely, rapid, and widespread. Larry Craig pleaded guilty to "disorderly conduct" in Minnesota in the hopes that no one would notice in his home state of Idaho. A quarter-century ago, when Craig started his congressional career, that strategy might actually have worked.

For those who haven't been following the news: Craig is a U.S. Senator who was arrested in June for soliciting sex in a Minneapolis airport men's room. He also happens to be a staunch opponent of gay rights, with a zero voting scorecard from the Human Rights Campaign.

People love sex scandals, and they especially love a sex scandal that brings a moralistic finger-wagger to his knees (ahem). Perhaps that's why the above list -taken from recent memory, and by no means exhaustive-includes only one Democrat. Liberals enjoy sex as much as anyone, and they surely have their skeletons. But when someone soliciting forbidden sex is known for railing against sexual sin, it makes for a juicier story.

What is striking about the Craig saga is this: despite his over thirty years of public service, virtually no one rallied to his defense. Conservatives view him as a deviant. (Mitt Romney, whose Idaho presidential campaign Craig had chaired, referred to Craig's behavior as "disgusting" before the senator even had an opportunity to release a statement.) Liberals view him as a hypocrite. Absolutely no one views him as credible. (His claim that he touched the arresting officer's foot because he has a "wide stance" rang especially hollow.)

Various sides in the culture wars will try to make an example of Craig. Gay-rights opponents will spin the story as further evidence of homosexuality's sordid nature, not to mention its vicious power. After all, if seemingly God-fearing men like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig can succumb to such behavior, who among us is safe?

Gay-rights advocates, by contrast, will spin it as evidence of the dangers of the closet. After all, openly gay people generally neither want nor need to troll restrooms for clandestine encounters.

The opponents are right to point out that sex is powerful, in a way that can make smart people do dumb, sometimes disastrous things. They're wrong to think that this point is any more applicable to homosexuality than to heterosexuality (note Vitter's name in the list above).

True, straight people don't typically seek sex in public restrooms. But that's partly because (1) public restrooms are mostly segregated by sex and (2) "quickie" sex is anatomically less convenient for women-which still hasn't prevented some from joining the "mile high club" in cramped airplane lavatories.

The bigger reason is (3) straight people don't feel the desperate need to conceal their erotic interests in the way closeted gay people do.

And that's where gay-rights advocates make a decisive point: the culture of the closet is unhealthy for everyone involved. Lying about one's sex life makes it easier to lie about other things; it also precludes the counsel of friends in an area where such counsel is desperately needed. (See previous point about sex being powerful.)

Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank put it well in a Newsweek interview regarding the Mark Foley scandal: "Being in the closet doesn't make you do dumb things, doesn't justify you doing dumb things, it just makes them likelier." Frank should know: he was once embroiled in a scandal of his own involving a gay prostitute living in his Washington apartment during the 1980's, when Frank was still closeted.

I'll concede one point to gay-rights opponents: the fact that Larry Craig sought sex with men doesn't prove he was wrong to condemn gay marriage, oppose workplace protections for gays, or support the military ban. He was wrong about those things independently of his sex life. In any case, our lives don't always reflect our best judgment.

But the fact that Larry Craig sought sex with men does mean that he ought to have mustered more compassion for gays than his public stance suggested. (It's one area where his stance was decidedly narrow.)

It's easy to call Craig a deviant, a liar, and a hypocrite. It's hard to feel compassion for someone who showed little of it to those who deal openly with challenges he knew privately. But compassion is still a virtue. Craig may not deserve it, but right now, he desperately needs it.

After Roll Call broke the story on Monday that Republican anti-gay Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho had pled guilty to misdemeanor lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport men's room, leading conservatives were quick to throw him overboard.

At townhall.com, Hugh Hewitt rejected Craig's denials and called for his immediate resignation. "I realize," Hewitt said, "that I did not say this about Senator [David] Vitter [R-La., who apologized in July for 'a very serious sin in my past' after his telephone number appeared on the client list of the so-called 'D.C. Madam'], but Craig's behavior is so reckless and repulsive that an immediate exit is required." On Tuesday morning, the group bloggers at National Review Online (NRO) were quick with the wisecracks. John Podhoretz said, "Couldn't Craig just have called an escort service? Oh ... wait ...." Jonah Goldberg made fun of Craig's spokesman for describing the men's room arrest as a "he said/he said misunderstanding," and suggested alternate denials like, "This is all a terrible misunderstanding. The Senator is a bus station man."

Matt Foreman, Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, used the occasion as a teaching moment. After slamming Craig's hypocrisy, he said, "There is sad irony that a United States senator from Idaho has been caught up in the same kind of thing that destroyed the lives of dozens of men in Boise in the 1950s, so tragically chronicled in 'Boys of Boise.'"

What strikes me as I watch Craig's denials is the depth of his self-deception, which apparently goes back at least to 1982 when he served in the House of Representatives. That year, he proposed to the then-Suzanne Scott six months after he responded to a scandal by publicly denying having had sex with congressional pages. Craig's arrest in June of this year, just eight months after denying gay sex charges by Mike Rogers of blogactive.com, suggests a recklessness all too familiar in the closeted and powerful.

A classic consequence of self-repression is that one's underlying nature, being unchanged, inevitably bursts out in inappropriate ways. It is no surprise that Craig would resort to sleazy restroom sex, since he is unwilling to see homosexuality in a more favorable light. As Matt Foreman observes, this is pathetic. It reminds me of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet who believes that if he prays hard enough, the Blue Fairy will make him into a real boy. Craig's own denials hint at the fairy-tale connection: twice during a contentious interview with the Idaho Statesman, he exclaimed, "Jiminy!"

Fate stepped in, as Jiminy Cricket would say, but not in the way Sen. Craig might have wished. On Aug. 27, the same day that Craig was definitively outed, another kind of conservative - prominent Washington pundit Andrew Sullivan - married his partner Aaron Tone in Provincetown. Here we have a nice juxtaposition: On one hand, a man who has consistently opposed any legal protections for gay citizens even as he engaged in furtive gay sex in restrooms. On the other hand, a self-affirming gay man who has advocated marriage equality for nearly two decades. The gods have a fine sense of irony.

We are witnessing a cultural shift: Henceforth, the Washington establishment will have in its midst a living exemplar of same-sex marriage, which just by refusing to hide will be a continual rebuke of the slander that only straight people are family. It is precisely because the public institution of marriage confers respectability and makes our relationships harder to dismiss that homophobes have sought so strenuously to cut gay couples out of the Constitution.

To be sure, cultural change does not automatically translate into victory at the polls. The latter, as Congressman Barney Frank likes to remind us, requires organizing and persuading and getting out the vote. There are still millions of Americans who would prefer that their gay children suppress their desires and choose an opposite-sex spouse. People in denial like Craig are surrounded by enablers. We may be at a turning point, but our struggle is far from over.

On another off note, this week's famous groom has made his share of enemies. But the attacks against him from left and right have been going on for years, and Andrew Sullivan is still standing. A quick search of the blogs this week turns up catty comments, salacious rumors, and entries like "Did you see the pic Aaron painted of Andrew's bottom?" I personally prefer the picture Andrew himself posted of the handsome, bearded Aaron asleep on a sofa with their two beagles.

The glare of the spotlight can be hard on any relationship, and even the most obscure of marriages can fail (though I happily note that the divorce rate is lower in Massachusetts than in the Bible Belt). Failure is a risk that we take whenever we set sail. Of course, Andrew would have to work overtime to catch up with the multiple marriages of various anti-gay politicians. All that really matters is that he and Aaron have taken the leap together.

A real marriage is not a Disney fantasy. We are not carried along by fate. We are responsible people capable of summoning forgiveness and generosity and humility to overcome our baser instincts. Like any worthy enterprise, a marriage takes devoted effort. So here's wishing Andrew and Aaron perseverance and grace to help them through the inevitable rough spots.

As for Larry Craig, whose career lies in ruins: Notwithstanding his contemptible coupling of squalid gay encounters with opposition to gay rights, he is more pitiful than anything else. In the end, the greatest victim of his lies is himself.

As you probably already know, on August 11 a churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) approved by a vote of 528 to 431 a resolution that "prays, urges, and encourages" its bishops to refrain from disciplining gay and lesbian clergy known to be in same-sex relationships.

The resolution did not prohibit anti-gay bishops from bringing disciplinary action against clergy in gay relationships, but it gives more or less official permission to gay-supportive bishops who decline to discipline gay clergy to continue what many have already been doing for several years. And it surely sends a signal to bishops who may be uncertain or undecided about what action to take in such cases.

The ostensible reason for the resolution was that a church task force is involved in producing a long-delayed "social statement" on human sexuality and the resolution merely urges bishops not to take any action until the statement is issued in 2009. It is possible that there may have been signals from within the task force that it would recommend a more permissive policy. Certainly if no change were anticipated, the resolution would not have any point. But it is also possible that the resolution was meant as a signal to the task force by church leaders about what direction to take.

This is obviously a step forward for the Lutherans and in a way for all mainstream Protestants. It signals a shift in sentiment by clergy and church leaders in favor of non-celibate gay clergy. But it may not be immediately obvious just how remarkable a resolution this is. Consider several implications.

One was pointed out by the Rev. Bradley Schmeling, a pastor who was recently defrocked after telling his congregation and bishop that he is in a gay relationship. Schmeling told the New York Times, "For the first time, the church is saying that there are partnered gay and lesbian pastors who are serving faithfully and well in our church." True enough, and apparently his congregation agrees because they plan to keep him as their pastor anyway, frock or no frock.

In addition the resolution places the ELCA in the position of embracing some apparent contradictions. For one thing it says that formal church policy forbids sexually active gay clergy, but bishops can cheerfully ignore church policy if they like.

For another, the resolution applies only to gays and lesbians who are already ordained clergy; it does not apply to sexually active gay seminarians who wish to be ordained. No doubt some bishops will take the resolution as not forbidding the ordination of gay applicants, but technically the resolution says if you are already a pastor in a gay relationship you can stay, but if you are not yet a pastor we won't let you in.

This is not an unusual way for large organizations to make policy changes. You plant a contradiction or a new line of thinking somewhere in the system and wait for it to be formally taken account of sometime in the future when conditions are favorable for change. Nor is the technique unknown among Supreme Court justices.

The resolution certainly takes the long view. Every year public opinion about gays and the legitimacy of gay sexuality moves an average of one-half to one percent in a pro-gay direction. Nor are Lutheran church leaders immune to experiencing those changes themselves. So with every year that passes, the chances for a gay-affirmative position improve.

Underneath the conflict between pro- and anti-gay positions, the church is having to decide between Jesus and the Apostle Paul. Jesus as he is presented in the four gospels issued no condemnation of homosexuality although he was eloquent in his condemnation of some other behavior. In addition he often revised, corrected and disobeyed ancient Jewish law.

By contrast, Paul never met Jesus, never heard him preach, didn't know his teachings, and had no knowledge of the gospels (which had not been written yet). The only aspect of Jesus Paul cared about was his supposed resurrection which as a Pharisee he was predisposed to believe anyway. So with his rabbinical training in the early Hebrew texts, he often harkened back to the Hebrew moral codes, including their condemnation of homosexuality, and added them back into early Christianity.

Whether the Lutherans consciously recognize the conflict in these terms or not, they seem to have some sense of what the fundamental issue is. The New York Times quoted Emily Eastwood, head of the gay-supportive Lutherans Concerned, as saying, "The dam of discrimination has been broken. ... The church is on the road to acceptance."