Right-Wing Senator Pilloried, for Nothing

Sex Police on the Prowl

(Editorial Note)

Things are really bad when a U.S. Senator gets embroiled in a sex scandal in which no sex actually occurred. On June 11, Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, was entrapped by a sex cop hiding with spider-like patience in a stall in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport men’s bathroom. The cop claimed that Craig did some toe-tapping and hand-waving between stalls—signals, said the cop, of sexual intent. Craig decided to plead guilty to “misdemeanor disorderly conduct.” When the story hit the news a few weeks later, quick as greased lightning, the high-ranking Senator was pressured to resign by Congressional Republicans and the Bush White House, whose sinking ship is leaving plenty of rats floundering in its wake.

Now in a surprise twist, a Craig spokesman said on September 4 that he would fight to overturn his guilty plea and maybe would not resign his Senate position, as he had first announced. What is happening to Craig is no joke, notwithstanding the fact that we as Marxists have just about nothing in common politically with him (except our mutual opposition to gun control). The kind of sexual entrapment that nabbed Craig, as with the whole panoply of laws against consensual sexual conduct, is a deadly danger to everybody.

We neither know nor care whether Craig is gay or not—and it should be no business of the government. Certainly there is some rather bitter irony here, given the vicious sexual hypocrisy of bourgeois politicians in general. According to the Idaho Statesman (2 September), which has been hounding Craig relentlessly, “Longstanding rumors that the married senator might be gay stem from a 1982 congressional page scandal, in which Craig, then a bachelor, was the only member of Congress to issue a pre-emptive denial of involvement.” Nevertheless, throughout his lengthy Congressional career, Craig has consistently voted against gay rights: against same-sex marriage, against easing restrictions on gays in the military, against extending employment discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation.

Craig was able to dodge the earlier bullet, unlike Republican Congressman Mark Foley last year. Foley’s homosexuality was the worst-kept secret in Washington, despite his record of hypocritical attacks on the rights of gays. But the Florida Congressman had the bad luck to get caught before the midterm elections sending suggestive e-mails to male pages in their late teens, and he got the chop. At the time, we made clear that we opposed the persecution of Foley on the basis of his sex life, as well as the entire “pedophilia” hysteria. We oppose all laws against consensual sex, including reactionary “age of consent” laws. As we wrote in “U.S. Torture Elections” (WV No. 878, 13 October 2006), “The only guideline that should exist is that of effective consent, regardless of age, gender or sexual preference. We defend Foley as we would any victim of sex witchhunts.”

It is a sign of the right-wing political climate that ostensible socialists have capitulated to these sex witchhunts, whose source lies in reactionary “family values” ideology. Last year, the International Socialist Organization, which touts its defense of gay rights, joined the moral crusaders by denouncing Foley’s act as “a criminal outrage.” The Spartacist League has also defended Michael Jackson and even then president Bill Clinton, whom the Republicans sought to impeach over the Lewinsky sex scandal—about the only thing he did in office that was not a crime from the standpoint of the working class. Uniquely on the left, we have defended the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) against persecution. We have consistently opposed the intrusion of the government into private life, recognizing that such persecutions aim to prop up the oppressive institution of the family and to strengthen the bourgeois state in its regulation of the population. Government out of the bedrooms—and snitches out of the stalls!