LAWFUEL – The Legal Newswire – Opinion, by Rex Wockner – Even though a judge ruled last week that Sen. Larry Craig cannot withdraw his guilty plea stemming from a Minneapolis airport sex sting operation, the Idaho Republican says he has changed his mind about resigning from Congress.
Which raises the question: What will it take to make this guy go away? Here we are six weeks after Craig’s arrest became public, and the story just will not die. This is intolerable — even for gay folks like me. I can only imagine how straight people must feel.
So, if you don’t mind terribly, I’d like to do my part to help kill this story off, put it out of its misery, make it go away forever. This will require a bit of setup, and I’ll have to spoon-feed some straight readers some gay secrets.
The most amazing thing for me is that Craig still insists he wasn’t “cruising,” which is gay lingo for looking for partners in men’s rooms, forest preserves, rest areas and the like (remember George Michael? Wham!), or even just while walking down the street or shopping at Jewel.
Assuming the airport police report is accurate, and by ruling against Craig on Thursday that is exactly what a Minnesota judge did, the insurmountable problem with Craig’s insistence is this: We know better.
There are millions of gay men in the U.S. who, like me, came out in a less-enlightened era when we didn’t have much choice but to learn about restroom cruising. There were few other ways to find each other. Some of us weren’t so much looking for “public” sex as we were just looking to meet. But regardless of our motivation, we all — millions of us — have one thing in common: We learned, and we can still speak, the secret language that the police report says Craig spoke fluently in a men’s room at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
