Conservative moral relativism is on display once again.
After Sen. David Vitter, R-La., an unctuous spouter of family values, admitted last year that he’d consorted with call girls back when he served in the House, there were no calls for his resignation from his Senate colleagues and certainly no investigations launched by the Senate Ethics Committee.
Why? Not because these senators disapprove — or care — about Vitter’s predilection for paying for it (and reportedly wearing diapers when doing so). No, the issue is numbers. If Vitter had resigned, the governor of Louisiana, a Democrat at the time, would have replaced him with a Democrat, which would have tilted the already tight balance of power in the Senate one more seat to the left.
But when it comes to gay sex shenanigans, there’s no such reticence. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Id. — no less a family values spouter than Vitter — was not even seeking to pay for the sex he was after in an airport men’s room last summer. And yet, the Senate Ethics Committee is coming down hard:
The Senate Ethics Committee said Senator Larry Craig engaged in “improper conduct” during and after his arrest in a Minneapolis airport bathroom by seeking to withdraw his guilty plea and showing his business card to the arresting officer.
“We consider your attempt to withdraw your guilty plea to be an attempt to evade the legal consequences of an action freely undertaken by you — that is, pleading guilty,” the committee wrote, according to a letter posted on its Web site yesterday.
The panel said that Craig’s showing his Senate business card could be construed as an attempt to receive special treatment. The committee also criticized him for failing to secure its approval to use campaign funds to pay legal fees.
So Vitter did not expect, and receive, special treatment from the DC Madam because he was a member of Congress?
What Craig did was illegal. Having sex in a public bathroom is tacky, gross and a public nuisance. But what Vitter did was also illegal — and, yes, the statute of limitations had expired — but to ignore his shenanigans while pursuing Craig wreaks of homophobia.
