Saturday 1 September 2007

Larry Craig Meets Avenue Q

You are probably aware of the recent scandal with Republican Senator Larry Craig from Idaho. He was arrested for soliciting a male undercover police officer for sex in a busy airport public restroom, pled guilty, and now is in denial/breakdown about the whole thing. It's really a very sad affair, especially considering the man's political career has been largely built on publicly hating GLBT people.

The blessed Internet has given us the ability of instant commentary and media mashability. Here is Larry Craig on Avenue Q, the Sesame Street-esque Broadway musical about real-world problems (video from Michael Jenson at AfterElton and AmericaBlog):



Although I've not seen Avenue Q, it sounds great. This video is, ehh, interesting (marginally not safe for work).

Seriously though, just how many conservative Republicans are really just self-haters unable to cope or deal with their own sexuality? Democrats have sex scandals too, but they are 1) boringly simple (ie, consensual non-kinky sex between adults) and 2) Democrats do not claim to be the morality police who have a duty to legislate what Americans can and cannot do in their own homes.

Political memory is short, so here is a partial list of recent bizarre sex scandals by conservative leaders, all of whom have made a public career out of persecuting those they consider "morally deviant." These are the people who would run our country.

  • US Senator Larry Craig, (R-ID), pled guilty to soliciting sex from an undercover police officer in a men's public restroom in the Minneapolis airport. (2007)
  • Glenn Murphy, Jr., 33 year-old president of the Young Republican National Federation under investigation for sexually assaulting a sleeping 22 year-old man. (2007)
  • State Rep. Bob Allen, (R-FL), offered to pay $20 to a male undercover police officer for oral sex in a public restroom in a park. Allen claimed that he felt intimidated by "a pretty stocky black guy" and offered money and oral sex as a way to avoid an attack by the undercover officer and the other "black guys" in the park (who were also undercover officers.) You cannot make that up. (2007)
  • Ted Haggard, conservative mega-church pastor and former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals (with 30 million members), and regular spiritual advisor to George W. Bush has had a long time history of meth binges and use of gay prostitutes. (2006)
  • US Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) built his career legislating against pedophiles. That's reasonable enough, until it came out that he was a pedophile himself. He sent sexually abusive emails to a male under-age congressional page, and later many other minors came forward to disclose inappropriate behaviour from Rep. Foley. Then it came out that other Republican leaders had known about it for a number of years, and had taken no other action than to warn Foley to stop. Foley's defense? He was an alcoholic who had been drunk when he had made the sexually inappropriate overtures. Oh, well that's ok then. (2006)
  • Jim West, Republican Mayor of Spokane was charged with multiple counts of child molestation and abusing his political power to receive sexual favours from young men. (2005)
  • Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, a White House "journalist" from a non-existent news organization called Talon News. With no journalism credentials, Gannon was given press passes from the White House, where he was known for asking suspiciously Bush-friendly questions such as "how are you going to work with people [Democrats] who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" Suspecting he was planted there, real journalists found he was also a gay prostitute nicknamed Bulldog and had published many nude pictures of himself online, many with a gay military motif. According to Secret Service records, Gannon/Guckert often checked in to the White House on days in which there were no press conferences, and appears to have spent the night at the White House on multiple occasions (see the logged visits here). What happened on these occasions is not known. (2005)

The party of family values.

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