Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Larry Craig teaches conservatives a lesson on entrapment

Of all the elements of the story surrounding Idaho Sen. Larry Craig and his supposed restroom escapades, no one could have foreseen this latest development. Conservatives are now leading the charge against police gay-sex stings in public spaces.
Case in point: Long-time Republican operative Mary Matalin told NBC’s Tim Russert on “Meet The Press” last week: “The people that I talked to, who are not particularly Craig fans, said, ‘That sounds like entrapment. Don’t the cops have better things to do than tap dance in bathrooms in the airport?’”
Yes, it sounds like entrapment. Yes, you’d think cops would have better things to do with their time, especially at an airport in this so-called Age of Terror. Gay rights activists have been saying this for decades. So it’s about time Matalin and her conservative friends noticed that such sting operations are a poor use of tax-payer dollars and a much better tool for ruining people’s lives than stopping men from cruising.
As Matt Coles, director of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Huffington Post, “The fundamental problem is that a sting isn’t calculated to stop the activity. Are you trying to stop people from cruising, or are you trying to arrest a lot of people?”
Obviously, the goal is to arrest a lot of people. In fact, according to the New York Times, Craig wasn’t the only one arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Over the sting’s three months, 39 others were also swept up in the police sting. That’s about one arrest every three days.
Craig is certainly no hero. In fact, his voting record is anathema to the gay civil rights movement. And he certainly proved himself to be not very bright – who pleads guilty to a crime you say you didn’t commit? In the end, however, it’s hard to argue that Craig actually broke the law.
His explanations are ridiculous – most notably, his claims he has a wide stance and he was merely picking up a piece of toilet paper. But even the arresting officer admits there was no sex and no indecent exposure. Sgt. Dave Karsnia of the Minneapolis Airport Police says he made the arrest based upon what he interpreted as signals Craig was allegedly trying to send. Even if they were signals, and they likely were, if the guy in the adjacent stall didn’t pick up on them, nothing tawdry would have taken place.
To make matters worse, Craig was one of 20 men in the Minneapolis sting charged with “interference of privacy.” But that law, only two years old, was passed to halt the use of hidden cameras in women’s bathrooms. It has never been used in connection with a sting in a men’s room.
And as Jeffrey Dean, a lawyer for four of the arrested men, told the Times, “There can be no invasion of privacy of a person who is inviting the conduct. The undercover officer, by his own account, sits there in an adjacent stall and signals the person that he wants the contact.”
Such letter-of-the-law language should be well understood by conservatives. But what is frustrating is that they were not willing or able to see the humanity of those who in the past have been caught up by such sting operations. These bottom-feeders, as far as they were concerned, got whatever they deserved for their forays into public sex. After all, would people like Matalin stand up against such entrapment if Craig were not involved?
It took one of their own – a red-meat conservative from red-state Idaho who swears up and down that is he is not gay and has “never been gay” – to be entrapped for them to realize how silly this all is.
But there is still one piece of this that conservatives – Craig included – still don’t get. Their anti-gay policies – everything from trying to ban same-sex marriage to refusing to include sexual orientation in federal hate crimes law – help to create a national environment that drives people like Craig underground, into the closet, and inside men’s room stalls.

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