The pot was stirred up again this week over the revelation that Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, a bastion of the Republican Party in the potato state, pleaded guilty to charges stemming from being netted in a police sting in June in one men's restroom where homosexuals reportedly had been trolling for sexual partners at the Minneapolis airport.

One e-mail from the man who wants us to label public figures as gay, in response to my e-mail outlining The Tribune's policy, included this statement:

"You said, 'The Tribune does not believe its mission has anything to do with outing homosexuals who prefer to stay in the closet.' So, what you are saying is that as a news media, The Tribune will not report the relevant facts of a story. Nice. Often, a closeted gay hypocrite is the crux of the story. How considerate of The Tribune to aid and abet such monsters!"

Easy for this guy to say. Newspapers have to conform to the law - especially the law that governs defamation, libel and slander. Quite simply, we cannot make statements about people in the newspaper just because we believe them to be true. We must believe them to be true, have some evidence they are true and have no malice in printing the statements. We cannot defame people on a whim - because they look gay or seem to act gay.

According to the Web site www.expertlaw.com: "Generally speaking, defamation is the issuance of a false statement about another person, which causes that person to suffer harm. . . . Libel involves the making of defamatory statements in a printed or fixed medium, such as a magazine or newspaper.

"Typically, the elements of a cause of action for defamation include:

"1. A false and defamatory statement concerning another;

"2. The unprivileged publication of the statement to a third party (that is, somebody other than the person defamed by the statement);

"3. If the defamatory matter is of public concern, fault amounting at least to negligence on the part of the publisher; and

"4. Damage to the plaintiff.

"In the context of defamation law, a statement is 'published' when it is made to the third party. That term does not mean that the statement has to be in print. . . .

"Most jurisdictions also recognize 'per se' defamation, where the allegations are presumed to cause damage to the plaintiff. Typically, the following may constitute defamation per se:

* "Attacks on a person's professional character or standing;

* "Allegations that an unmarried person is unchaste;

* "Allegations that a person is infected with a sexually transmitted disease;

* "Allegations that the person has committed a crime of moral turpitude."

In other words, if you are going to call someone gay, you had better have an admission from that person, a court document that would substantiate such a claim or a photo of that person engaging in said activity.

Tribune Executive Editor Tom Baden explains, "In general, The Tribune believes that a person's sexual preference is his or her own private business. There has to be a clear public interest, a news reason, to disclose that information.

"Now, in many respects, the zone of privacy does shrink quite a bit for elected public officials, as opposed to, if you will, average citizens. There's a lot of fairly personal information about public officials - their education, the forces that shaped their lives - that voters expect to be informed about. Having said that, however, we still believe that sexual preference is usually a private matter.

"In the case involving Sen. Craig, clearly the incident and the charges lodged against him raised questions about his sexual identity and made this a public matter. The senator himself brought this up following the disclosure of his guilty plea."

The key in that last comment is guilty plea. That court proceeding brought the whole issue out of the privacy concerns and into the public arena. In America, the courts are public, of course with the exception of President Bush's secret court that deals with issues of national security. Public courts means that the public has a right to know what happens in those courts.

The release of the police interrogation tape of Craig this week made the issue even more painful for Idaho residents: mental pictures of two men playing footsie in bathroom stalls and the police officer's continued references to Craig "lying." At one point Sgt. Dave Karsnia accused the three-term senator of lying and said,''Embarrassing, embarrassing. No wonder why we're going down the tubes."

Now, Craig is trying to withdraw his guilty plea and endures cries by prominent Republicans to resign.

Don't expect The Tribune's policy on disclosing people's sexual orientation to change; we still have to live under the laws of the land and our own ethical standards.

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* The Reader Advocate's phone number is (801) 257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. E-mail: reader.advocate@sltrib.com.