Z Magazine Online has an interesting article that discusses the Larry Craig incident from a surprisingly different perspective and makes several good points about the homophobia demonstrated by the manner in which Craig was arrested:"The police have a long, sordid, deeply destructive history of targeting gay men, entrapping them, and blatantly lying about their own behaviors. From the earliest years of gay activism, continuing until now, enormous legal battles have been fought to protect gay men from police entrapment. For LGBT groups to take the Minneapolis police at their word is outrageous. The LCR even went so far as to defend the police: “[Craig] violated the trust of the people and now he’s questioning the honesty of law enforcement officers.” There is something radically wrong when a LGBT group—even a conservative one—takes the side of the police in an entrapment case.
These police entrapment and sting operations—usually presented as campaigns to make public space safer and increase quality of life—have always been integral to larger political agendas, often tied to the election of specific politicians or parties. By their very nature, these campaigns target disenfranchised cultural groups—most frequently prostitutes, gay men, teenagers of color, poor people of any color—and portray them as dangerous threats to “regular people.” It’s an easy way for police and politicians to score points.
The fallout from these actions can be tremendous. In 2002 a police sting of men who were meeting in the back room of an adult bookstore in Johnson, Rhode Island, resulted in 13 arrests. The names of the men, along with their addresses and places of work, were printed in the Providence Journal. Stuart Denton, one of the men and a politician in Plainfield, Connecticut, committed suicide.
As homosexuality’s stigma has decreased over the years so have the suicides of men caught in these stings, but they still occur. More common are men being fired from their jobs, losing their position in the community, and having their relationships and families destroyed. It is important to realize that these results are not the incidental, collateral damage of entrapment, they are the intended results of campaigns meant to intimidate and harm specific groups of people. As such they are intrinsically homophobic.
Richard Kim on his blog at the Nation website points out that the Minneapolis police have “since May of this year...made 41 arrests like Craig’s in an elaborate sting operation. Not to be outdone, the head of the Atlanta International Airport police boasted that they’ve arrested 45 men...including ‘a couple college professors’ and ‘the CEO of a bank’ in a similar sweep.” Doug Ireland, in New York’s Gay City News, notes that Michigan’s Triangle Foundation reported that police there had a “caseload of 770 arrests in four months.” For national gay and lesbian groups to fail to address the Craig arrest in the context of these shameful ongoing entrapment campaigns is political cowardice."
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