Offenses [Senator Larry Craig's role in our march toward equality]

by Hendrik Hertzberg for The New Yorker
September 17, 2007

On the evening of January 21, 1953, Bayard Rustin, a forty-year-old organizer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a leading organization of religious pacifists, gave a talk, in Pasadena, California, about anti-colonial struggles in West Africa. Among the admirers who approached him after the speech were two young men. Late that night, he and the young men were arrested after being discovered in flagrante in a parked car. He pleaded guilty to a charge of “lewd vagrancy” and was carted off to serve sixty days behind bars.

The episode was a source of shame for Rustin, not on account of his homosexuality (about which, for that era, he was astonishingly relaxed) or because of the stigma of jail (he had spent two years in federal prison as a conscientious objector) but because he knew that his carelessness had let down his colleagues in the nonviolent movements for peace and racial equality. Yet his service to those causes did not end. Though he had to resign from the F.O.R., its secular twin, the War Resisters League, soon hired him as its executive secretary. In 1956, he became a mentor to the young Martin Luther King, Jr., beginning an association that, while rocky at times, culminated, on August 28, 1963, in the epochal March on Washington. The cover of the next issue of Life featured not King but the instigator of the march, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and its principal organizer, Bayard Rustin.

Rustin’s homosexuality, the Pasadena incident in particular, embarrassed and angered some of his political comrades. But none of them responded to it with cruelty or contempt. Senator Larry Craig, of Idaho, has not been so lucky. No sooner had Craig’s brother Republican politicians learned that he had been caught with his pants down in a men’s-room stall at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (where, a year from now, they will arrive by the planeload for their National Convention) than the stampede began. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, pronounced Craig’s conduct “unforgivable” and forced him to relinquish his posts as the senior Republican on three Senate committees. From the campaign trail, Senator John McCain called for the miscreant’s resignation. “I don’t try to judge people, but in this case it’s clear that it was disgraceful,” the Senator judged. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, offered a singularly unfeeling response to the troubles of the man who, until the day before, had been the Idaho co-chairman of, and one of two “Senate liaisons” to, the Romney for President campaign. “Frankly,” Romney said, “it’s disgusting.”

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