The recent episode involving Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) in the Minneapolis airport men’s room tells us much about the state of values in red-state America. First, there are lessons concerning the values of liberty and privacy. It was only four years ago that the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas struck down a Texas law criminalizing sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home. Speaking for the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy eloquently pointed out, 539 U.S. at 562, the close connection between liberty and privacy:

Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private place. In our tradition the State is no omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not have a dominant presence. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought… and certain intimate conduct.

So I would ask in light of those pronouncements, what business is it of the police if consenting adults choose to engage in sexual activity behind closed stalls in public restrooms? Why are airport police, who should be busily attending to terrorism threats, lurking in airport restrooms waiting to be propositioned for sex? And why should private, discreet conduct (or in Sen. Craig’s situation, a mere offer to engage in such conduct) that occurs out of the sight of the public and that is in no way harmful to others be spotlighted and prosecuted by public authorities?

But it’s hard to feel too sorry for Sen. Craig. Had he been asked in the days before his arrest whether this conduct should be permitted in public restrooms, he would have pontificated ad nauseum about the importance of “values” and the evils of the “gay lifestyle” and urged law enforcement to aggressively root out and prosecute what he no doubt would have referred to as vile and disgusting conduct.

For Sen. Craig got elected and then re-elected first to Congress by Idaho voters by constantly appealing to the “traditional family values” of Idaho voters, and by voting on matters involving sex in a manner calculated to please the theocrats who purport to speak for Idaho’s “values voters”. A few months ago he voted against expanding research for embryonic stem cell lines. Earlier he had voted against spending tax dollars to reduce teen pregnancy through sex education and the use of contraceptives. And during his two terms in the Senate he voted to ban same-sex marriages, against adding sexual orientation to the definition of hate crimes, and against prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation. Thus, Sen. Craig’s biggest vice is that he was a “family values” hypocrite of the highest order, falsely assuming the appearance of heterosexual virtue while strolling airport restrooms for anonymous gay sex.

But the harshest criticism must be reserved for the members of the Senate Republican Caucus, who gave Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana a standing ovation after that “family values” politician vowed not to quit the Senate following the revelation that he had been a frequent patron of D.C. and New Orleans whorehouses. But, unless I’m mistaken, isn’t the only difference between the conduct of these two senators the gender of the persons they chose to have sex with?

Now that the hypocrisy of the “family values” coalition has been fully exposed, let’s hope the nation can move on to more important matters of public policy, such as how to extricate ourselves from the quagmire known as Iraq?

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