LARRY CRAIG’S STANCE

Difficult times show who your friends are – wanted or not – as conservative Idaho Sen. Larry Craig discovered when his Republican colleagues frog-marched him out of the Senate recently. He is scheduled to stand today before a Minnesota judge to ask that his guilty plea in a sex sting be vacated; standing beside him, figuratively, will be conservatives, liberals and those others who dislike the senator’s politics less than they dislike his arrest.

Left out and looking increasingly shrill will be the Republican Party, which miscalculated in this case and soon will appear even more dissembling than the senator sounded on the police tapes after his arrest.

Sen. Craig was famously nabbed last June because he apparently solicited sex in a men’s room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. He was charged under a law that prohibits anyone from engaging in “offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct … tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others.” His party exhibited those last traits, though whether they were reasonable is doubtful.

The humor of an older conservative man from the law-and-order party being caught in such a situation at first overwhelmed any chance for reasonable discourse about what had happened. But with time, more people have noticed the obvious: All the senator was alleged to have done was to seek, quietly and in a coded way, a lawful activity – sex. How can that be illegal? Should his life be wrecked over this? Do bar patrons know about this law?

The Republican Party’s haste to distance itself from Sen. Craig had more to do with homosexuality than his guilty plea. Its fundraising ability, already in trouble this year, meant it could not afford even a party stalwart who appeared caught soliciting an act the party’s base rejects. This isn’t necessarily homophobia by the party; it’s certainly cash-ophilia.

Those speaking in his defense usually have come from outside his party, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a friend of the court brief arguing that the Minnesota law is likely unconstitutional and so couldn’t be the basis of a conviction. Left-leaning commentators such as Frank Rich in The New York Times, who called Sen. Craig’s conviction “manifestly unjust,” joined right-leaning columnists such as George Will of The Washington Post in deploring the arrest.

By using a guilty plea to quickly cleanse itself of the Idaho senator, the party helped turn him into a sympathetic figure. That’s an amazing change given the senator’s anti-gay voting record and his awkward denial of events. But, ultimately, his wide stance may become more accepted than his party’s narrow one.