By Andrew Sullivan, talking about Republican Senator Larry Craig:

He grew up in a different time, and a different place, where even the possibility of being gay was inconceivable. I don't think he even thinks of himself as gay, or has any idea what being gay might actually mean. I think he thinks of his sexual orientation as a "lifestyle" (to use that hideous term Lauer kept referring to) that can be overcome the way one overcomes smoking or poor eating or sexual compulsion...

Craig was seeking in that toilet stall a connection, a shard of intimacy, that the world would not give him, or that he could not give himself. No one should have to live without that intimacy and dignity - no one...

It is just a tragedy that the party that Craig belongs to is committed to prolonging the pain and the denial of so many people - in order to appease the casual fears of the insecure, and to use those fears to sustain political power.