ACLU backs Larry Craig

Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), who plead guilty in August to engaging in lewd conduct in a Minnesota airport bathroom, is fighting to keep his job in the upper chamber of Congress.  This week, Craig picked up the support of an unlikely civil rights organization:

"Sen. Craig has not always been a great friend of civil liberties,but you shouldn't have to endorse the civil liberties of others to keepyour own," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, alluding toCraig's history of voting against gay rights.

"The real motive behind secret sting operations like the one thatresulted in Sen. Craig's arrest is not to stop people frominappropriate activity. It is to make as many arrests as possible --arrests that sometimes unconstitutionally trap innocent people," Romerosaid in a written statement.

Few people would dispute that the purpose of these stings is to catch people in the act and make a lot of arrests.  The real question, generally speaking, is whether there is a legitimate reason for this kind of sting.  Last month on CNN, a report about a practice called "cruising," that takes place in public restrooms all over the country, is of concern to the FBI:

While the ACLU may think of the Craig incident as an unconstitutional violation of civil liberties, many parents throughout the country consider it something they don't want their children to witness happening in a public restroom. 

In the oddest way possible, this scandal has helped raise awareness about this safety issue:

"Where's the bathroom?"

That's the question camera-toting tourists inMinneapolis are asking as they visit the men's room where U.S. Sen.Larry Craig, R-Idaho, was arrested in a sex-solicitation sting.

"It's become a tourist attraction," said KarenEvans, information specialist at Minneapolis-St. Paul InternationalAirport. "People are taking pictures."

Whatever raises awareness and helps keep our public places safe and family-friendly, I'll take it.

Comments

[Chris Huston]

Ah the ACLU. Just like lawyers, people badmouth them until they are in need of them

[granny]

"Whatever raises awareness and helps keep our public places safe and family-friendly, I'll take it.'

I don't believe you mean "whatever", Todd.

We have a "whatever" president. We saw him as a "whatever" governor.

It is right, in my opinion, to seek to keep lewd behavior out of public places - it is against the law. In addition, I suspect the presence of these "sting" cops is making public men's rooms a lot safer for little boys who are historically at risk in them from stalking pedophile's . I'm happy about that. At the same time, I think the ACLU is right; and therein lies the difficulty of enforcing a social contract among millions of people - who want a lot of other things for themselves in addition, and abandon the responsibility of ensuring the contract works to "authorities".

Tough problem.

[granny]

OOpsie daisy: Got posted before I finished...
First of all "pedophile's" should NOT be possessive in that sentence.

Further - saying something is "against the law", as I have done above, does not inherently mean it is a bad thing. Some things should not be against the law, in my opinion - I'd have changed that if I hadn't blurped myself into "print" inadvertently.

Most important, though, is the problem at hand. The "system" is far from perfect, and letting a small group of "elected" men and women make these gigantic social decisions for us, in the form of "enforcements", and religating resposibility for "making others behave" to this "system", while we go off shopping, simply does not cover the problems anymore.

Maybe it never did, but it doesn't now.
What to do about that needs to be a major public dialogue.

When I think about it - it seems so very sad, and puzzeling, that we are still so essentially vacuous and non-committal about the fossil fuel issue - the global warming.

[Chief Editor: Todd]

You are right, Granny. I meant 'whatever' as a folksy way of saying, generally speaking, that children in this country need to be safe. In terms of law, "whatever" is not an actual reason to trample on someone's civil liberties. Darn right about that!