Completely Heterosexual

It finally makes sense to me; no, wait, I'm still confused.

Larry Craig, like Ted Haggard, is completely heterosexual, although it has not yet inspired a Roy Zimmerman song. For several days, Leno has been pumping a video clip from MSNBC with anthropologist William Leap (identified as a Northwestern) professor, but I find him identified online at American U). Leap states that the Craig bathroom incident does not involve gay sex, just sex between men who are seeking sex with other men, which generates an apparent amount of skeptical laughter from the crowds in Burbank. Dan Savage helps with a CNN appearance, also referred to in his column. Some insight also comes from a seminal 1970 work, recounted, among other places, in this article. (So today, I'm actually giving some links!) Short upshot: guys who seek out sex in mensrooms are nearly all "straight-identified," rejecting the gay label and gay culture, and are disproportionately conservative, Republican men. This goes along with the well established phenomenon that among those who identify as straight, homophobia and homoerotic arousal are strongly correllated. Some experts, apparently including Leap, think Craig is not dishonest in denying he is gay, that the term is not properly applied to the deeply closeted, that it makes more sense in some ways to separate what closeted men do from what we label as gay, and that Craig may be completely sincere, although deluded, in describing himself to others as straight. At some level, he sees himself that way, never having heeded columnists like Savage, who have written a million times that, hey, guess what, if you like sex with other men or other women, that is rest-assured, straight-up, end-of-argument gay.

Should police patrol mensrooms? There're various problems justifying the patrols -- the concerns are overblown and exaggerated by prejudice; policing legitimizes the apprehension, which is counterproductive; the interest in preventing exposure to facts of life that are not inherently harmful is somewhat dubious in an open society, even where those exposed would be children; the actions employed, while not entrapment, tend in that direction; the menace at maximum is small, while most metropolitan police departments have more serious issues to worry about. None of these, save the last, is a knockout.

Is Craig a hypocrite? Not as obviously as most assume, but yes, for the reason Savage notes: he probably would have voted for tough penalties against the very thing he was caught doing. But there is no contradiction between his vile opposition to healthy gay identification and activity, on the one hand, and his inulgence in unhealthy closeted behavior on the other.

Should Craig be investigated if he does not voluntarily resign? Yes. Merely being a pervert or a hypocrite, or using his position for political self-interest are all normal. But: He insists his guilty plea, made under oath, was a perjurious lie. The police account shows an apparent attempt to use his official position to avoid the consequences of the crime. His status as a closeted man active in same-sex hookups raises a concern that he would be exposed to blackmail. Any of these could be a legitimate ground for further examination. Less seriously, he may enjoy a good roasting. Recalling his Meet the Press appearance in 1999, one can almost imagine him saying, "Yes, by all means, investigate me, censure me; I've been a bad boy, a naughty boy. I need to be disciplined."

What is the larger lesson? The conservative majority in the redstate world is not as crazy as it may seem. If you lived in that world you would see the natural appeal of conservative positions. Gay people in blue America go about leading ordinary lives, albeit coping with prejudice. In red America they are more likely to sneak off from the closet to the toilet for anonymous sex. It may seem offensive for Santorum or Scalia to liken gay sex to bestiality, but in red states, there're a lot of farms, and boys do what they will do. It's not just gays, but the risk of animal sex is a lot more present if discipline were to fail. You can see why they may be more preoccupied over there. They also have more crime, more teen pregnancies, more abortions, they draw more of their economy from the public sector, and in general suffer more of the problems that their policies claim to fix. The Republican party and allied institutions are just about the only loci in the nation where unqualified minorities are routinely given positions over better-qualified whites. Look at Clarence Thomas, or a more spectacular laughingstock, Alan Keyes. The redstate right is focused on real problems, they just have not attributed their sorry state to the spectacular failure of these policies, or noticed that these problems are less severe in the civilized world outside their own.