I’ve been trying to resist posting on the whole Larry Craig affair because it seems that everyone else in the blogosphere has covered just about every conceivable angle of this story. But, after hearing that Craig is now determined to fight the ethics complaint that was filed against him and is reconsidering his decision to resign, I simply couldn’t resist the temptation. I have to say that I was delighted to hear that Craig seems to be doing his best not to allow discussion of this issue to die quietly.
Don’t get me wrong, I have little sympathy for Craig given his voting record on gay rights issues and his complete failure to apologize this past Saturday to the lesbian and gay community for”what [he has] caused”us. I would have thought that, gay or not, being on the receiving end of sexual orientation discrimination might have helped him to empathize with the difficulties faced by lesbians and gay men and might have moved him reconsider his past actions and maybe, just maybe, apologize. I guess that was just too much to hope for.
What I’m happy about is that the Republican party will be forced to deal with this issue and to face up to a situation that it helped to create. The Republican party has pandered to social conservatives for years in an effort to create an atmosphere of oppression and repression in which stories like Craig’s would be commonplace. They bear some of the blame here, and it is nice to see that they are not going to get off quite as easily as they had hoped.
-Anthony C. Infanti
