Speak Compassion

If there is anything recent history has taught us, it is that you can be as anti-gay as you would like to be in religion and politics, but sooner or later they are going to arrest you with your pants down. That has been the case with a long line of anti-gay preachers and politicians. Let’s review just a few:

• New Jersey Governor, Jim McGreevy who was exposed for having an affair with his male employee. He later resigned and stated the now famous words, “I am a gay American.”
• Ted Haggard, anti-gay preacher and one time spiritual advisor to President Bush was exposed for having an affair and buying methamphetamines from male prostitute Mike Jones. He later went on to claim he was “cured” of his homosexuality in just a few short weeks in therapy.
• We had Republican Senator Mark Foley of Florida arrested for sending sexual text messages to underage pages during senate sessions.
• Representative Bob Bauman, a conservative from Maryland who championed moral issues was arrested for soliciting sex from a teenage, male prostitute.
• Then we have anti-gay State Senator Bob Allen from Florida arrested for offering an undercover cop $20 for oral sex in a public restroom. He later blamed the event on the fact the other men in the restroom were all black and it made him nervous. He claimed he feared he “was about to be a statistic” would have said anything just to get away.
• Now we have the latest scandal of Republican Senator Larry Craig from Idaho arrested in an airport restroom sting.

This latest story of Senator Craig being arrested in a public restroom has made for some interesting news stories. Each day the story has gotten crazier. What started as a hand waving afternoon pick me up in the airport has become a new case for free speech as the ACLU has taken on the case. It is now believed that the good Senator’s arrest may have been unconstitutional. A spokesman for the ACLU, Anthony Romero is quoted by ABC news as saying, “We believe the sting operation used to apprehend Mr. Craig was unconstitutional. The statute the government is relying upon makes it a crime to use certain offensive words.” What their argument essentially says is that asking someone to sleep with you is no more illegal in a public bathroom than it is in the supermarket, as long as you aren’t having sex in the supermarket. Romero was also quoted saying, “It is a crime to have sex in public. It is not a crime to propose or solicit sex in public, whether it’s in a bar or in a bathroom.”

Even stranger is that the toilet stall in the Minneapolis airport where Craig was arrested has become a tourist attraction according to the Associated Press. Airport workers report people taking pictures of the bathroom stall and the outside door. Amazing the simple things by which we humans will be fascinated.

Regardless of Craig’s guilt or innocence, we can no longer ignore the big pink elephant in the room. The same problems these anti-gay preachers and politicians speak out against, are the same problems they create. The longer antigay preachers use hate speech to create a world where people are driven into the shadows by fear of rejection, the longer people will be arrested in the shadows doing things they shouldn’t. The closet is a dark and scary place. The majority of these men are married, closeted and afraid to come out. They then go and preach to make others afraid to come out. It is a spiritually violent and emotionally cruel cycle that needs to end.