Casting stones

I don't know anything about Senator Larry Craig but what I've been reading in the papers in the past two weeks or so.

Republican. Conservative. Anti-gay marriage. Says he isn't gay. Pled guilty to a misdemeanour after being caught in a sting for soliciting sex in a men's room.

Craig says he wished he hadn't pled guilty. But he's going to resign-which will please many of his Republican brothers.

The whole Craig melodrama is horribly sad.

Mostly, of course, my sympathy lies with Senator Craig's wife.

What can she be feeling?

I'm really tired of closeted, or barely closeted gay men like NJ's Jim MGreevey (if that's what Senator Craig is, and the jury is still out) ripping apart the fabric of a family life with bad behavior.

On another level, if Senator Craig turns out to be gay, so what? If it had been alright to be openly gay and a Republican back when he was thinking about political office, maybe he wouldn't have gotten married.

Or maybe she doesn't mind if/that he is gay.

Who the heck knows? But one thing is sure-the Republicans are part of a very dysfunctional family right now. And the fact that they turned on Craig, but let Louisiana's David Vitter* off the hook without having to give up so much as a committee assigment, is the height of hypocrisy.

*Whose name appeared on the records of an operation police describe as a prostitution ring-Vitter said he was repentant for an unspecified "sin"-his wife, who had earlier been critical of Hillary Clinton for her decision to stay wed to Bill Clinton, backed him up.

It is strange, even for this skeptic, to watch a party seem to implode-but maybe this is, as in the housing market, a midcourse correction. There is certainly a lot of "ick factor"-but it isn't nice to allegedly store almost 100,000 in y0ur freezer, either, like Representative William Jefferson, is it?