Bravo to Senator Larry Craig, (Republican, ID) for deciding to stay in the Senate for the remainder of his term ending in January, 2009.
Pleading guilty of a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge in the Minneapolis airport in June brought a firestorm of demands from fellow GOP Senators, friends and presidential candidates to vacate the Senate forthwith.
Never in history has a party attempted to run a stalwart of Craig’s stature out of town so fast over such a minor offense. And never in history has the Senate disciplined a Senator for a misdemeanor unrelated to his duties as Senator.
Had Craig’s arrest and guilty plea for behavior at the Minneapolis airport resulted from his becoming unruly over being bumped from a flight, it would barely have survived one day’s mention in the press. But Craig, a social conservative who has spent his entire career trumpeting the GOP’s use of homophobic fear to keep social conservatives and evangelicals firmly in the GOP camp, was arrested in a gay sex sting in the airport men’s room. His hasty guilty plea was a ludicrous and failed attempt to keep his real sexual preference in the closet.
It took Craig decades to finely do something positive for America. For the next 450 days, his mission is to walk into the Senate with a large mirror to hold up and reflect back the hypocrisy that his party practices to divide America.
Originally published in Glen Ellyn News, October 12, 2007
