The passion of Sen. Craig

The Café hasn’t kept up with all of the conversations engendered by the arrest of Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), but Unitarian minister the Rev. Deborah Hafner has, and she’s presented an interesting perspective in this and other items on her blog.

A sample of her thinking:

I do not believe that I should judge private adult consensual behavior, but when it invades public spaces or when that person is a public figure actively working against the very behaviors that he engages in, then I think we have the right to weigh in. Yes, I expect that many of us are experiencing a sense of schadenfreude (gotta love that word, now someone needs to teach me how to pronounce it), but I also spoke out against Bill Clinton having sex with his twenty something intern.

As I have written here many times, the hallmarks of an ethical, moral sexual relationship are that it is consensual, nonexploitative, honest, mutually pleasurable, and protected — and that ethic applies to straights and gays, married and single people, teenagers and the elderly. I fail to see how anonymous sex in a public bathroom could ever meet all of those criteria, regardless of the sex of the participants.

Meanwhile, at Salon, Joe Conanson asks:

As one embarrassing episode follows another, with almost predictable regularity, perhaps it is time for Republicans and conservatives to ask themselves an obvious question: What makes the Republican Party — and the conservative movement more generally — so attractive to closeted homosexual men?

Past Posts
Categories