>From the New Yorker, one of the best comment pieces on the whole pathetic Larry Craig affair (the US Republican senator who got caught cruising for sex in a men's toilet). Hendrik Hertzberg draws an interesting parallel with Bayard Rustin, the great African American civil rights activist who was a pacifist inspired by Gandhi and also quite openly gay.
Rustin was also caught in flagrante, and at a time when the consequences of being gay were far more serious now, but the there was a huge difference in how he was treated nu his civil rights colleagues, and how he treated the incident himself. Despite his case taking place so many years ago, he and his colleagues had a level of maturity that Craig and the Republicans are incredibly far from: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/09/17/070917taco_talk_hertz berg "...Disorderly conduct, the misdemeanor to which Craig pleaded guilty, requires proof of "offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous or noisy conduct" or "offensive, obscene, or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger or resentment." His real misdemeanor is to be a conflicted, closeted homosexual who is driven to seek furtive (though consensual) sex by sending coded signals in public toilets. The real offense, the real obscenity, is that even a jurisdiction as enlightened as the Twin Cities still feels free to devote police resources to compounding the unhappiness of such people. "Last week, Craig suggested that he might not resign after all, and moved to reverse his guilty plea. If he succeeds, the resulting trial, whatever its outcome, might help discourage the kind of treatment to which he has been subjected. Bayard Rustin would appreciate the irony of a Republican senator engaging in a sort of unconscious civil disobedience. Rustin's biographer Jervis Anderson wrote a decade ago that "his openness about his gay lifestyle sprang from a feeling that he was entitled to be whatever he was, even at a time in America when homosexuality was prosecuted as a crime." That time is not quite finished, but perhaps Larry Craig, despite himself, will help bring it a little closer to its inevitable end. ♦"
