The Political Whore

The revelation of the arrest and guilty plea of Sen. Larry Craig to some very gay sounding bathroom activities raises lots of juicy issues (for all my lurking media brethren, first and foremost is, how in the hell does the arrest of a sitting US senator go undiscovered for months??). There’s the whole Gay Republican/oxymoron thing, as well as hypocrisy.

I get the hypocrisy in cases such as Craig’s and state Rep. Bob Allen’s, where they clear anti-gay voting records or ideologies, but I ain’t down with the idea that a gay person morally can’t/shouldn’t be a Republican. People in the GLBT community have every right to, say, enjoy making lots of money or fighting to shrink the size of government or believing that the war in Iraq is going well as anybody in the straight community does, for instance.

But rather than having me opine further, because I’m not gay and I apparently wasn’t much of a Republican either,  I asked the head of the local Log Cabin Republican Club (and frequent PoHo blog commenter) Jim Pease if he had some thoughts. Here’s what he sent me:

I can’t say that intolerance is limited exclusively to the Republican Party otherwise we wouldn’t have had the Jim McGreevey debacle.  When people can get past the concept of intolerance/fearing/hating gays and lesbians, the “closet” will hopefully become a thing of the past.

Moving on to your inquiry, these “maybe-gay” Republicans are the creator of their own calamity.  They create a fantasy that they want to be in but don’t like.  Unfortunately they bring a lot of people into this fantasy and it’s these people who suffer the most when it all comes crashing down.  I don’t have much compassion for “maybe-gays” but rather I feel sorry for the people around them who were in the fantasy world and didn’t know it.

People like Craig and Allen are idiots.  If they think they can lead a double life, hiding something they so vehemently speak out against, then when they get caught “with their pants down” (pun intended), they should be ready to be criticized for following a double standard and prepared to take the consequences. Hypocrites are plentiful, regardless of the party or the issue.

And if all else fails, run to rehab!!!!

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