Have you been following the saga of Larry Craig, the soon-to-be-ex-senator from Idaho who was arrested for disorderly conduct in a men’s room at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport? I’m trying to figure out exactly what it was he did that was illegal.
OK, stay with me...
Here we have a senator who not only voted for a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, but also voted against adding sexual orientation to the definition of hate crimes, and voted against prohibiting job discrimination against gays, and yet – he seems to enjoy anonymous gay sex. So, I guess that makes him a hypocrite. I get that.
But the last time I checked, you couldn’t get arrested for being a hypocrite. Hypocrisy aside, I find myself in the unusual position of being somewhat sympathetic of a Republican politician.
While I enjoy a GOP sex scandal as much as the next guy, I have to ask the question - what exactly was the senator’s crime? He was soliciting sex in a public place, specifically, a men’s room. Is there a law against that? He wasn’t engaged in a sexual act, mind you. And, there was no money involved. He was just tapping his foot to see if the guy in the next stall was interested in, you know, some sort of sexual - whatever.
Hmmmm.
All right, so let’s just say I’m in a public place, say a nightclub, and I meet a lady there and she asks me to come home with her for sex. Could she be charged with a misdemeanor? What if it was a gay bar and, instead of a lady, it was a dude I met on the dance floor? Could he be charged with disorderly conduct if he solicited me for sex?
What if the encounter took place, not on the dance floor, but in the men’s room?
So, Senator Craig is tapping his foot while seated in a stall in the men’s room. Then the undercover officer in the next stall begins to raise and lower his own foot. While I don’t claim to be an expert in anonymous gay sex protocol, it would seem that, at that point, the senator could reasonably assume the person in the next stall would not object to having his foot touched by the senator’s foot. Most likely, had the undercover cop not raised and lowered his own foot in response to the senator's toe tapping, thus giving the green light for further escalation, the senator would not have touched the cop’s foot with his own and would not have started moving his hand along the bottom of the wall between the stalls.
Again, I’m not saying, I’m just saying – where exactly did Senator Craig cross the line?
Maybe it was before he went into the stall, when he was peering, for several minutes, through the crack of the door of the stall where the cop was staked out. That actually does seem a little creepy, now that I think about it. Hell, I don’t even like my wife coming into the bathroom when I’m taking a dump. So, having someone peering through the crack at me while I’m on the toilet – again, that would be creepy.
But, the question here is this – where and when and under what circumstances is it ok to hit on somebody, and when is it not ok? What gets you in trouble and what doesn’t?