Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are

Oh, Senator Craig. Seriously. I don't know whether to dislike you heartily or feel bad for you, or both. I think I'll go with both.

Dislike you heartily for:
--Voting NO on prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation, and voting YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage (September 1996)
--Voting NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000 and Jun 2002)
--Voting YES on a constitutional ban of same-sex marriage (Jun 2006)
--Being a terrible liar. Your foot just ended up touching another guy's foot in the next stall by chance? You pleaded guilty just to wrap up the annoyance and get to your meetings? Larry Dear, as my Dad used to say: we may be stupid but we're not dumb.

At the same time, I feel bad for you because you obviously grew up in a family, community--and political party?--who somehow told you that who you are is completely unacceptable. So unacceptable that you self-hate with punitive politics, and self-sabotage with seriously inadvisable behavior for anyone regardless of sexual orientation. When I think of your situation, I try to put myself in a place where my basic human urges feel so debased and so evil to me and to those around me that I find my only outlet in public toilets. Public toilets, Senator. Even my wildest imagination can't take me to such a feeling of personal shame and self-hatred. Unfortunately, so many people--young and old--feel that shame every day.

You shouldn't be ashamed of being gay. You shouldn't even be ashamed of wanting sex in a dark public bathroom (believe me, a large percentage of heteros at my college did it every drunken weekend). But you should be ashamed, and held to account, for denying other gay people the right to proudly declare who they are as people, and to proudly--and legally--declare their love for another human being in the bright light of day.