Larry’s Craig’s bathroom antics should be a source of glee for no one - save in the obvious, sardonic sense. Politically speaking, it’s no more a joy for the Democrats than it is for the Republicans. If anything, it exposes a particularly poisonous rift between the parties that should trouble them both, but that neither seems to be bringing attention to.

The rift I refer to is the sell-out of the Republican party to the socially conservative interests - to the homophobes, to the Bible-thumpers who scream damnation, to people who lose sleep because prayer in public school isn’t mandated. And in case people on the Right are interested, it’s those interests that make the people on the Left think there’s something wrong with you: They wonder how you could ever support a political movement that so thoroughly desecrates our national heritage of equality, acceptance and freedom of belief. They don’t get how slightly lower taxes is more important than ridding our nation of sodomy laws and their ilk that ruin lives like Larry Craig’s.

Larry wanted to hook up, chances are. And chances are, if it had been a straight guy instead of a cop, the guy in question would have walked out that bathroom feeling a little wierded out. If it had been a gay guy, who knows? But the point was that it was neither - it was a law jockey on a sting detail that, in his own words, leads to arrests like Craig’s “every day” - and rather than either of the two innocuous outcomes above, Larry’s been sent up the river.

The reasons why have not been in question so far as most commentary is concerned, with right-wing talk radio outlets being the usual insipid exception. Hannity, shaking his head such that it was audible, posited a liberal conspiracy. Jason Lewis, filling in for Rush yesterday, attributed Craig’s defamation to liberal assaults and a conservative unwillingness to fight back. Surely, listeners the nation over nodded, they too feeling powerless and bitterly glad to have someone to blame. Craig, in that sense, was irrelevant.

But the talk radio commentary was highly relevant in that it was dancing on the edge of a moral abyss that, in our ostensibly socially-progressive new century, few on the right want to admit. Namely, that the Republicans are locked into vicious condemnation of homosexuals given that their party still depends on catering to the social conservatives - both as a bloc like Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, and simply to the base, frightened instincts of people who feel their traditions challenged by the self-expression of others. Gay marriage blowing your mind? Who you gonna call? Thousands know the answer to that question, and in 2004, the winning team cited “voting its values” on social issues as the principal reason to cast a vote for Bush.

As a consequence, it wasn’t the classic villains of the Democratic stable like Reid, Clinton or Leahy that went after Craig - it was McCain, eager to suck up some burly social-conservative support to bolster his anemic campaign; it was Romney, never slow to miss a chance to prove he’s just as judgmental as any Liberty University student or our current Commander-in-Chief; it was his own party that fell on him like jackals.

You want to know who’s behind the attacks on Craig, Hannity? Want to know why the Republicans aren’t defending him, Jerry? It’s because they’re the ones making the attacks!

Inspecting this political cannibalism, you see at the bones of it a particularly twisted perception of modern American history. There’s a trope about the good old days, that if FDR or Eisenhower were around today, they’d be leagues more conservative, socially, than even Tom Tancredo. And I don’t buy it.

I don’t think that even the vaunted “founding fathers” - those who truly believed in the words of equality they set down, like Jefferson and Washington - would hesitate a moment to recognize the equal worth of any American, regardless of that person’s sexual orientation. Civil rights issues may be relative to our time, but the fundamental principals that fight for civil rights do not change, and have enjoyed what success they have in this country from being hallowed in the philosophical sinews of our nation. And yet, having been withered by three decades of Democratic dominance, the Republicans allied with the crooked champions of Jim Crow and Southern Baptism - the Dixiecrats - to restore their party’s strength, and conservatism has since paid the price of that bitter pill. Nixon fought off the dominance of the religious lobby for a long time, then Reagan welcomed in the Moral Majority and by the time of Gingrich’s “Contract with America”, it was assumed that if you didn’t get vein-poppingly mad about the “moral relativism” in our culture one moment and praise Christ the next, you were not going to float in a red state. Barry Goldwater summed it up well when he turned to Bob Dole in 1996 and told him, “We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?”

Sadly, it seems many Republicans can’t imagine that, and commentary like Hannity’s and Lewis’ doesn’t help any. They and others who want to keep small-government, pro-economic frugality, pro-defense voters under the right-wing of the tent will grind their teeth about Democrat scheming, corruption and defamation - all to avoid the real issue:

It’s not about the Democrats. It’s about the Republican’s own party being beholden to the prudish, to the intolerant, to the people who dress in salvation and legislate damnation. It’s those people who’re sending Larry Craig down the drain. And of all the things to be offended by in this seedy story, I think it is those “values” that forced him to skulk in the bathroom in the first place, criminalized him for doing so and now are leading his colleagues to rip him apart that are the most “disgraceful”.

It’s easy to see where “values voting” can be prioritized, in that much of what we do abroad is policy, whereas how we treat one another is immediate and defines our national character, either as hypocrites or as champions of freedom. When Republicans go to the polls to select their next battery of candidates, I do encourage them to vote their values. They would just do well to remember them first.