Sen. Larry Craig’s big embarrassment has given the Log Cabin Republicans some reason for optimism. Their Colorado president, Adam Crowley, is among those who hope it nudges their party into a more open-minded attitude about gays.
The Log Cabin Republicans, a coalition of gays and lesbians who remain loyal to a party that loudly attacks their lifestyle, joined in the general GOP condemnation of Craig’s behavior in a Minneapolis airport men’s room.
They came down hard on the Idaho Republican because it was more important to denounce the impropriety and hypocrisy than it was to defend someone who insists he isn’t gay but still seems to know all the secret signals involved in men’s room trysts.
“He pleaded guilty to something that is inappropriate,” Crowley said. “It has nothing to do with sexual orientation. It has nothing to do with his past voting record, though the hypocrisy is staggering.”
The group’s national president, Patrick Sammon, said Craig showed “terrible judgment” and “obviously failed to live up to the principles he espoused as a lawmaker.”
Craig is part of the social-conservative wing of the Republican Party – the anti-gay, anti-abortion, “family values” wing. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor stemming from a sting designed to entrap men soliciting sex in an airport men’s room, but has been rethinking his resignation and trying to withdraw his guilty plea.
There’s reason to feel sorry for Craig. Like Ted Haggard, he’s a man who found his innate desires unacceptable, but apparently succumbed to them anyway. And there’s reason to question the sting operation. Was Craig really a danger to anyone who wasn’t clued in to the elaborate restroom ritual of shoe-tapping and hand-waving? And wouldn’t this have been, if it hadn’t been a set-up, a situation involving consenting adults?
But the conservative Republican base finds this inexcusable. The hypocrisy, the self-loathing, is repugnant to the rest of the electorate, and especially to gays.
These are tough times for Republicans. The war is widely unpopular, the administration is losing its best thinkers, and too many GOP moralists, from Craig to Mark Foley, have been exposed as recklessly kinky.
Whether or not Craig leaves, the Republicans are unlikely to lose his Senate seat, one of 22 Republican seats up for election in 2008. The Democrats have only 12. Craig or not, Idaho is safe. Unlike Colorado, Idaho hardly ever plays footsie with Democrats.
Crowley thinks the Craig scandal adds pressure on his party to re-examine its hostility toward gays and its alliances with “groups that want to preach morality in the public square. The people they’ve hitched their wagon to are not leading by example,” he pointed out.
He says he’s tired of seeing gays used “as political pawns in dealing with the religious right. … The Republican Party has made a pact with the religious right to win power. Both sides may be having buyers’ remorse.”
Crowley, who also is executive director of the Colorado Business Council, says he remains a Republican because he’s a conservative who believes in limited government, lower taxes, a strong defense and a free market economy. He supports gun rights and thinks abortion is “horrible,” but wouldn’t ban it.
The government, he says, “should stay out of my personal life … . I believe in the sanctity of marriage – I just want to join it.”
That’s more in keeping with the old, traditional Republican model – the pre-social agenda model. Crowley thinks the party is going to have to move back in that direction, and “Gays are either going to have to stay in the men’s room or … become fully enfranchised.”
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
