Aug 31, 2007  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

News this week that Republican U.S. Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho had been arrested and pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge for allegedly seeking a sexual encounter in an airport restroom has triggered yet another congressional sex scandal with possible implications for the 2008 elections, according to advocates for both major parties.

Craig, who declared in a press conference on Tuesday, “I am not gay and never have been gay,” became an instant news media sensation, generating public discussion on the often hidden topics of gay sex in public restrooms and undercover police efforts to crack down on such activity.

Police at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport said an undercover officer arrested Craig June 11 in a men’s public restroom after he made non-sexual gestures inside a stall with his hands and feet that suggested he was soliciting the officer for a “lewd act.” Police said they sent the officer to the restroom in response to complaints by the public about sexual activity there.

Craig has denied he was seeking sex in the restroom and has insisted police misunderstood his gestures, including the sliding of his foot into an adjacent stall so that it touched the foot of the plainclothes officer.

According to police, Craig stated that “he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine,” the arresting officer wrote in a police report.

By Wednesday, three Republican senators called for Craig’s resignation and GOP Senate leaders removed him from senior committee positions. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney quickly removed Craig’s name from the Romney-for-president web site, where he was listed as chair of Romney’s campaign in Idaho and described Craig’s situation as “disgusting.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joined other GOP Senate leaders in calling for an ethics committee investigation into Craig’s conduct over the airport arrest.

By the Blade’s press time Wednesday, not all elected officials were calling for Craig to resign. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of two openly gay members of Congress, said Craig should be allowed to finish the remainder of his term, which ends January 2009, and have the option to go before Idaho voters in the 2008 election.

“What he did, it’s hypocritical, but it’s not an abuse of his office in the sense that he was taking money for corrupt votes,” Frank told the Associated Press. “I think people should resign when they have clearly done the job in a way that is dishonest.”

“It’s one thing to say someone can’t be trusted to vote without being corrupt,” Frank added, “it’s another thing to say that he can’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by himself.”

Gay activists were quick to point to Craig’s longstanding record opposing gay civil rights legislation in his career of more than 20 years as a congressman and senator, including his vote in 1996 against a bill calling for banning employment discrimination against gays. He voted twice for a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and has expressed opposition to allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

“Senator Craig is the latest in a string of public officials who have yet to learn that the days of treating Congress as a game of charades where you say one thing and do another are over,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay civil rights organization.

“Throughout his career, Senator Craig has readily espoused his so-called moral values in an attempt to score political points by passing judgments and dividing our country without regard to his own personal life,” Solmonese said.

Other gay activists, while saying they don’t condone public sex, expressed concern that Craig’s current predicament was brought about, in part, by the type of police sting operation that gays have long criticized as abusive and unnecessary.

Sean Kosfsky, director of policy for the Triangle Foundation, a Michigan-based gay advocacy group that monitors law enforcement issues, said it was ironic that an anti-gay politician like Craig became ensnared in a police operation that appears to be unfairly targeting mostly closeted gay or bisexual men for arrest.

Kosfsky and other activists have called on police to deploy uniformed officers to discourage and, if necessary, make arrests in cases where public sex is a problem. They have argued that sting operations, which critics call “entrapment” schemes, are unnecessary and rarely ...