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Best Editorial Ever

From today's Washington Post

CRAIG'S LUST
Hypocritical? Don't Ask.
By William Saletan
Sunday, September 2, 2007; Page B02


Poor Larry Craig. He's being held to the same standard of sexual conduct he imposed on the U.S. armed forces.

Fourteen years ago, in his first term as a Republican senator from Idaho, Craig helped enact the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The Air Force, for instance, now says that any airman will be discharged if he "has engaged in, attempted to engage in, or solicited another to engage in a homosexual act."

According to the report filed by the police officer who arrested Craig at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in June, Craig stood outside the officer's bathroom stall for two minutes, repeatedly looked at the officer "through the crack in the door," sat in the stall next to the officer, tapped his foot and gradually "moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot . . . within my stall area." Craig proceeded to "swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds" three times, palm up, using the hand farthest from that side of Craig's stall. Most of these gestures, the officer said, are known pickup signals.

I feel sorry for Craig, who pleaded guilty three months ago to a charge of disorderly conduct. I hate the idea of cops going into bathrooms and busting people for coded gestures of interest. I'd rather live, let live and tell the guy waving his hand under the stall to buzz off. But that's not the standard Craig has applied to others. Any gay soldier, sailor, airman or Marine who admitted to doing what Craig has admitted would, at a minimum, lose his job for violating "don't ask, don't tell." In fact, many have been kicked out for less.

Most people think "don't ask, don't tell" means that if you don't announce that you're gay, you can keep your job. It should mean that. But in practice, if you don't tell, the military can -- and often does -- investigate and interrogate you until you're forced to tell.

Margaret Witt, a major in the Air Force Reserve, is in the process of being discharged because she is a lesbian. How did investigators find out? An anonymous tip. They tracked down her former partner, a civilian, and got the woman to admit that she and Witt had lived together. When they interrogated Witt, she confessed. If she hadn't, they could have prosecuted her for "false official statements" and imprisoned her for five years. Last fall, a federal judge conceded that Witt had "served her country faithfully and with distinction" and "did not draw attention to her sexual orientation." Nevertheless, he concluded, she had no constitutional grounds for contesting her discharge. If you don't tell, they make you tell.

Six years ago, the Army kicked out Alex Nicholson, an interrogator, under "don't ask, don't tell." How did he disclose his homosexuality? He mentioned it in a letter to a friend -- in Portuguese. A colleague found the letter, translated it and outed him. "Nobody asked me if I was gay and I wasn't telling anyone," Nicholson said. "You would think that a private letter that you had written in a foreign language would be sufficiently safe." But you would be wrong.

Last year, the Army discharged Bleu Copas, a sergeant, from the 82nd Airborne. The basis? Anonymous e-mails. The first time superiors asked Copas whether he was gay, the context was informal, and he denied it. The next time, they put him under formal interrogation -- "Have you ever engaged in homosexual activity or conduct?" -- and he refused to answer. Eventually, to avoid prosecution for perjury, he gave in.

Four days ago, the Record newspaper in Stockton, Calif., reported the recent expulsion of Randy Miller, a paratrooper who served in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. His offense? Being in a gay bar -- and rejecting a proposition from a fellow soldier, who apparently retaliated by reporting him to the Army. Like Witt, Miller admitted his homosexuality, but only under interrogation. If you don't tell, they make you tell.

Compare any of these cases to Craig's. You cohabit quietly with a same-sex partner for six years. You write a letter to a friend in Portuguese. You deny being gay but are interrogated until you give in. You're spotted in a gay bar rejecting a sexual overture. For these offenses, you lose your career -- thanks, in part, to a man who stared and extended his hands and feet repeatedly into a neighboring bathroom stall.

Were Craig's gestures ambiguous? Not by his own standards. Under the details of "don't ask, don't tell," he'd have to prove that what he did was "a departure from [his] usual and customary behavior," that it was "unlikely to recur" and that he did "not have a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts." But the Idaho Statesman reports three other incidents, from 1967 to 2004, in which Craig allegedly made similar overtures. On the newspaper's Web site, you can listen to an interview in which one of the men describes his tryst with Craig in a public bathroom. These accounts, combined with Craig's arrest report, would easily get him thrown out of the Army if he were a soldier.

Did Craig's arrest chasten him about "don't ask, don't tell"? Not a bit. "I don't believe the military should be a place for social experimentation," he wrote to a constituent two weeks ago. "It is unacceptable to risk the lives of American soldiers and sailors merely to accommodate the sexual lifestyles of certain individuals."

Now you know why Craig tried to withdraw his guilty plea. The cardinal rule of "don't ask, don't tell" isn't heterosexuality. It's hypocrisy. The one thing you can't do is tell the truth.

In that sense, Craig honored the policy in his own life. But that's the only sense. I don't think what he did should cost him his career. I'd like to cut him some slack. But first, I'd like to restore the careers of a few thousand gay Americans who have done a lot more for their country.

human@slate.com

William Saletan is national correspondent for Slate, the online magazine at www.slate.com.

The Destruction of the Sodomites

"'The day of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ was prefigured according to Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome by the fire of of Sodom, since all the sodomites in the world were annihilated on that night. The same Saint Jerome comments on Isaiah (VIII-X): "The light was so potent that it destroyed all those who engaged in that vice. It was the work of Christ. It carried out the extirpation of this filth from the face of the earth."' There is a mystery here. Modern research has found no source for the legend in the works of Jerome or Augustine, despite the specificity of the references, and has failed to trace it back beyond the early thirteenth century. But this fantastic and ugly fable, which turned the prince of peace and good will into a mass murderer, gained a powerful hold on the Iberian imagination. It was repeated in a theological thesis by a Cuban archbishop as late as 1860."

-Homosexuality and Civilization, by Louis Crompton, quoting from a 15th-century guide for inquisitors in Spain.

Fables and myth have the interesting advantage of embodying contradictions in symbolic form which, if they were stated rationally, in a form susceptible to logic, would be exposed as specious instead of appreciated as powerful images expressing ambivalences and conflicts. In the rhetoric of religion and politics, homosexuality is on the one hand completely unnatural and on the other so seductive that even the most confirmed heterosexuals have to be protected from it. The association of homosexuality with apocalyptic destruction is especially fascinating. Nobody knows exactly what fate it is that has to defended against by outlawing gay marriage, adoption by gay couples, a visible gay presence in the military--it seems incredibly bizarre that this hysterical movement has just given up entirely on preventing sodomy itself, which is all that really matters, just as they gave up earlier on preventing masturbation and birth control. The arguments are so confused I've never felt I could accept any analysis of them I've ever come across; I feel convinced that public defenses against homosexuality have to be rooted pretty deep in the unconscious, but theorists of "homophobia" usually seem to me to be conjuring up their own nightmare visions of the enemy--that is, homophobia and homophobiaphobia seem to come to the same thing (as do pedophilia and pedophiliaphobia). The most obvious relation between the dreaded sin of homosexuality (as in previous eras of witchcraft and various heresies) and the End of the World is simply that apocalyptic destruction stands in, in the unconscious mind, for "I don't know what": "If men get to fuck other men, then I don't know what." The thing is, that "I don't know what" has to be taken very literally: Why does one sin or another place the believer in the position, not just of expressing hatred or contempt, but of so entirely giving up any attempt at reasoning that they have to fall into the default position of "I don't know what," therefore: the future is blank or ceases to exist.

But this idea of the spontaneous destruction of all sodomites in a single night prefiguring the birth of Christ is something you can sink your teeth into. It of course invites a lot of the same kind of questions as any theological myth: If sin is that easy to eradicate, why not do it more often? If sodomites were eradicated in one night, why did they come back? And if they could, why bother eradicating them in the first place? But even more, I appreciate the idea of some kind of balance between the destruction of the sodomites and the birth of Christ; it makes one think about what Christ and the sodomites might have in common in the minds of believers. (Crompton also notes that in Italy as well as Spain, an interesting feature of the public martyrdom of sodomites is how much widespread sympathy it elicited, to the point where officials felt they had to intervene to soften the harshness of punishments.) It therefore suggests to me that the most dangerous aspect of a totalizing and comprehensive opposition to any sort of unreasoning prejudice, even at its most homicidal, is the failure to recognize the ambivalence at its root, and therefore the potential for altering apparently implacable conflicts. Why, after all, has religiously based anti-semitism all but disappeared in the Christian sects of the United States while it's become an even more dominant theme in Islam? It does no good to say it's "about" the Arab-Israeli conflict, in part because that just places the question at one remove instead of answering it. (I'm not denying the material sources of all important political conflicts; I'm just saying they don't explain away the accompanying ideologies and mass psychology of ideology.) It would be a mistake to put aside the question of how the most rabid anti-gay rhetoric satisfies homosexual impulses--especially in religious contexts.