Live from Austin!

This week the ACLU decided to stick their oar in regarding the vexed question of whether Larry Craig should have been prosecuted for soliciting gay sex in a restroom stall in Minneapolis Airport. Their logic was interesting. There is apparently case law in Minnesota to say that one has an expectation of privacy when in a bathroom stall, even if the stall is in a public place.

Therefore, the ACLU argue, it is entirely legal to have gay sex in the stall of a public toilet in Minnesota, since you’re doing it in private. Therefore, they conclude, the police had no reason to charge Larry Craig with lewd conduct; he was merely expressing an interest in pursuing perfectly legal private toilet sex in a public restroom–or to use what I gather is the technical term preferred by enthusiasts, ‘cottaging’.

Now, I don’t know whether it will stand up in court (ho ho), but it seems to me that the expectation of privacy pretty much ends once you stick your hand under the partition and wave at the guy in the next stall. Larry Craig wasn’t being spied on; he drew attention to himself. The ACLU’s decision to support Craig seems strange; I can only assume that they are trying to be fairer than fair.

What I find more bizarre, though, is the claim from many right-wingers that liberals would all have been defending Larry Craig if he was a Democrat. Maybe I’m out of touch. Perhaps they’re right, and the ACLU are merely speaking for all liberals in defending the right to cottage.

Well, I’m going to leap out of the toilet stall here and now, and declare that as a liberal, I am not in favor of cottaging.

See, when I go to the bathroom, I have only one kind of job in mind. I just want to find a clean toilet, perform whatever regrettable business is required, wash my hands, and be out of there. I do not want to be solicited for sex by a politician, not even if it’s Barack Obama. In fact, if Dennis Kucinich’s wife snuck into the men’s room, I still wouldn’t be interested. When I’m looking out for Number One, or Number Two for that matter, I don’t want a conversation. I don’t to make eye contact, let alone any other kind of contact. In short, I do not want to know that the rest of humanity exists. I just want a quiet, private moment to myself.

And that’s under the best of circumstances; because if it’s an airport restroom, I’m not going to be feeling at my best. I am not going to be feeling sexy. Although I may be about to take a ride on a jumbo, I’m not going to be interested in yours. While I’m always excited to get a glimpse into a cockpit… You get the idea. In the airport, you can pretty much guarantee I’ll be tense, tired and irritable. Sex of any kind will be the last thing on my mind.

OK, so you’re a Republican and you want to pick up guys for anonymous sex? Go to a gay bar. If the lavatory stall thing is such big turn on, I’ve got a radical idea: hang around a lavatory stall at a gay bar. You’ll be far less likely to bother someone who doesn’t want to be bothered.

In fact, if there’s enough pent-up demand, someone will probably start an exclusive vacation resort that offers toilet stall bridal suites, perhaps with nice padded seats and a ventilation system that can dispense a range of exciting fragrances. But in the mean time, your local gay bar will have to do. Life is harsh.

See, it’s all about context. Things which are perhaps appropriate in one context, may not be appropriate in a different context. Just because it’s appropriate to lie naked in a harness and get fisted at a private S&M club, that doesn’t mean we have to consider it appropriate in other similarly exclusive venues, such as the NorthWest Airlines executive lounge in Lindbergh Terminal.

Context, OK?

It was recently uncovered that Denver Police Department’s intelligence database was being used to track members of Amnesty International and other similar groups, on the grounds that they were “criminal extremists”. None of the people being tracked had any criminal convictions or arrests on their records. The tracking began before 9/11.

Denver police blamed a secretary for the “mistake”. The “mistake” surfaced because Denver Police shared their database with neighboring cities, and someone with a conscience at one of the neighboring police departments leaked the documents to the press.

As a result, Denver was forced to delete 3,277 innocent people from its database, owing to a complete lack of evidence that they had ever been involved in any kind of criminal activity.

This is the same data which is now being shared with the FBI, and the Justice Department has told the FBI that they don’t need to check any of it for accuracy before adding it to their national database. (See earlier posting.)

If you’re reading this, please join Amnesty and the ACLU. As the saying goes, if we don’t hang together, we will all hang separately.

It’s really a very simple process. The FBI could declare that the ACLU is supporting terrorism—hell, Fox News already did. Then the authorities could imprison me without trial, indefinitely, and/or deport me. Even though I’m a legal permanent resident, married to a US citizen.

“I call them a fascist organization, because what they’re doing is using terror to further their agenda.”

—Bill O’Reilly, FOX News, describing the ACLU.

People are still talking about the Pat Robertson / Jerry Falwell comments, that America was attacked because the gays, atheists, pro-choice people and ACLU members made god leave us defenseless.

I have to say, I feel quite honored that I’m now on his list four times over. No doubt about it—if they and their cronies ever achieve their revolution, I’ll be one of the first ones up against the wall. In fact, there probably won’t be enough space on my arm for all the tattoos. They’ll have to load me on a Concorde to get me to the camps fast enough.

So Falwell and Robertson are now whining that the evil liberal media are quoting them out of context. If you believe that, perhaps you’d like to read the entire context? It seems to me that “You’re quoting me out of context!” is the favorite excuse of the person who has been caught saying what he really thinks. It’s hard for me to think of an example where someone has genuinely been misrepresented by out-of-context quotation, unless you include ads for Hollywood movies that turn review quotes from “Amazing that they could release this crap” into “Amazing”.

Yesterday I finished off the Bill Hicks CD collection. I really needed something I could laugh at, something that was funny yet at the same time appropriately vicious, morbid and offensive. I can’t help pondering the fact that when Bill Hicks was my age, he was already dead. Ah, if only he had lived instead of Falwell…