Not, "I love my wife." Not, "I struggle with family values." Not, "I'm not a hypocrite."
No, the senior senator from Idaho wanted to make one thing clear: He doesn't like sex with men. Somehow that was the most damning political question raised by this week's revelation that Craig was arrested in June after soliciting an undercover cop for sex in an airport bathroom in Minneapolis. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, but then had second thoughts.
Newspapers scrambled for the earth-shattering answer: "Is he? Or isn't he?" Most of the senators' good Republican friends in Congress - those who initially defended disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley - were conspicuously silent the first day. Helpfully, Sen. Orrin Hatch's people reminded us he was too busy celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary to comment.
Squeaky-clean presidential candidate Mitt Romney hoisted the flagging family-values standard for the GOP while verbally scurrying to distance himself from the chairman of his Idaho election campaign.
"People who are elected to public office continue to disappoint. They somehow think that if they vote the right way on issues of significance or they can speak a good game, that we'll just forgive and forget," Romney blustered on CNBC. "It's disgusting."
Being gay - or even the hint of it - apparently is the beginning of the end for any self-respecting conservative. Except, of course, the Log Cabin Republicans. Unlike Craig, they are gay.
Bribery scandals are a mere inconvenience. Dallying with interns and lobbyists and pages is dismissed with a wink and a nod. As far as we know, Craig is guilty of, at most, infidelity. But the hitch is in his choice of partners. A few weeks ago, Sen. David Vitter pulled his wife into a tear-streaked news conference after his phone number appeared in an indicted Washington, D.C., madam's records. Weeks later, the Louisiana Republican is doing just fine - after sleeping with and paying a prostitute. No one has called for his resignation. That's just boys being boys. But boys being boys with boys, that's another matter entirely.
The Idaho senator's personal political crisis has again revealed the pitfalls of America's culture wars, our puritanical, adolescent fixation on sex, specifically sex with someone of the same gender.
Larry Craig knows that better than anyone. Twenty years ago, in the midst of another congressional sex scandal, he foreshadowed this week with a pre-emptive press conference to announce that he isn't gay. He protests too much.
Craig has a distinguished 20-year career in Washington as a broker for Western issues. He opposes gay rights and favors a federal ban on gay marriage. And he was chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, the conservative brain trust that picked so-called "wedge" issues the GOP could use to undermine Democratic opponents. This time, his wedge issue has come back to poke the party.
"Part of me is torn," says state Sen. Scott McCoy, a gay Democratic lawmaker from Salt Lake City. "I get a slight bit of pleasure seeing hypocritical, family values Republicans getting strung up on their own petard. But part of me feels really sorry for Larry Craig.
"He really is a product of society's stigmatization of homosexuality," McCoy adds. "In a way, the Republican Party's position on homosexuality created Larry Craig. By stigmatizing and demonizing gays, it causes people like Larry Craig to go underground and seek unhealthy and unlawful forms of sexual activity. In the bigger cultural war, Larry Craig is collateral damage."
walsh@sltrib.com
