A Story I Wish We Could Hear...

I wish Larry Craig would just come out as a married, gay Republican. It would be great for him and great for the country. He's not the only one--and his story would reveal to us so much about the utter sadness and madness of the Christian witch-hunt against homosexuals.

Idaho's Senator Craig, who is married and verbally denies being gay, plead guilty in June to lewd behavior or some such thing in the Minneapolis airport. Word is that he was soliciting sex from another man, who turned out to be a plainclothes police officer. Here's a "dramatization" of what allegedly happened, put together by a Sacramento local news crew. Craig initially said he was guilty, but now denies that he did anything wrong and says he should not have made that plea. The story is sensitively treated by Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic. Sullivan does a nice job of naming the hypocrisy of a gay guy who is so repressed that he advocates self-loathing legislation like a prohibition against gay marriage.

I can't help but find Senator Craig more than hypocritical--I also find him truly tragic. Mr. Craig is in a near-impossible situation. If he admits to being gay, the gay-bashing conservatives who wield power within his party (most of them self-professing Christians) will crush him; he could lose his marriage, and perhaps the love and support of his family; he will lose his power (which is not the worst thing in the world, given the circumstances); he will watch the carefully-constructed life--that he has spent decades pasting together, piece-by-delicate piece--fall apart. If he admits this part of his God-given nature, his life is over.

If Larry Craig continues to deny being gay, however, and manages, through secrecy and spin, to deny his sexual identity and hold on to his office, then he persists in a lie about the nature of the God-given sexual identity that should be one of his most cherished gifts and sublime joys.

Larry Craig's personal tragedy--which we witness only because his God-given sexual desires are so maddeningly persistent and irrepressible (as are mine and yours)--lays bare a national culture that represses, demonizes, and marginalizes healthy homosexual identity and monogamous homosexual relationships. This culture thereby shoehorns hundreds of thousands of gay men into private lives in which they feel compelled to secretively look for sex in men's rooms--a place which, frankly, is not good enough for something as meaningful to the human experience as sex. The Christian-led obsession with denying, renouncing, and criminalizing homosexuality prevents us from seeking what we all need: a shared culture in which we hold heterosexuals and homosexuals to the same set of sexual ethics, based in mutual respect and consensuality.

The nation could learn so much if we were ever allowed to hear the full and truthful story of the married, gay, Republican, Christian senator from Idaho. I'm guessing we won't get that chance.