August 30, 2007

Free Larry Craig

because hypocrisy is not a crime, and discretely looking for consensual sex partners should not be.

8 comments:

Rob said...

Was that a joke? I can't tell if you are serious.

Noumena said...

I'm serious. I appreciate the irony of being caught by same unjust public policies you support, but that still doesn't make the policies just.

MosBen said...

Noumena, should he step down?

Noumena said...

I think that's an issue between him and his constituents. Presumably, if they're homophobic enough to want their representative to all kinds of spectacularly homophobic legislation, they don't want their representative to be a gay man so firmly in the closet.

Unknown said...

Discreetly? He was soliciting a sexual encounter in a public restroom. I mean, if he was picking someone up in a public restroom in order to arrange a private sexual encounter elsewhere, that would be one thing. But I don't think that's what he had in mind.

I think it is perfectly appropriate for such behavior to be punishable as a misdemeanor. If there was such a thing as unisex public restrooms and a man propositioned a woman in precisely the same manner, I hope you would agree that that would constitute inappropriate harassment.

Noumena said...

As I understand it, he looked into a stall, went into the next stall, and tapped his foot a few times. That sounds quite discreet to me. Unless that description is wildly inaccurate, I also don't think anything similar would count as harassment in a heterosexual context.

Noumena said...

Since it came up in our thread -- Amanda does a little compare-and-contrast with harassment here.

Unknown said...

I'm going to have to mull this over a bit more. Thanks for the link.