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This time, it's U.S. Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), who is resigning after it became known that he pled guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct for allegedly soliciting oral sex from an undercover police officer conducting a sting operation in a public bathroom at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport.

Before I get to the political ramifications, a few thoughts and questions on this situation. The only reason the cop was there was because the bathrooms in the airport had become so notorious for the solicitation of anonymous, random gay trysts that public safety required the police to intervene. I would think that most parents wouldn't want to send their young son in there only to have him observe that sort of thing. Or witness it themselves, for that matter.

How far have we fallen as a society that men cruising for random gay sex in public restrooms – be it airports, shopping malls or freeway rest stops – is taken as a given and doesn't even raise eyebrows? Are we so crippled by political correctness that we can't even assure the citizenry of its ability to urinate without getting propositioned or at least observing such? Are we so unable to delineate right from wrong that we can't even require people to get a hotel room? If we have reached the point where random humping in the toilet or the solicitation thereof morphs into a civil rights issue, we have seriously jumped the tracks as a society and are headed for someplace very unpleasant. (And lest you think that an over-reaction, suppose someone did react in an aggressively negative way to such a solicitation; you want to wager they wouldn't be charged with a "hate crime"?)

Now then, onto this matter of "hypocrisy," a charge always leveled any time that anyone who is or is perceived as conservative stumbles behaviorally.

There is an old saying: "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue." Which is worse – talking about sin, even while you admit you're a sinner yourself, or denying that sin exists and using that as justification for all manner of licentiousness? Are we really better off having no moral standards at all, to the point of endorsing random copulation in the crapper, than to have a moral standard even as we realize that we all will on occasion fall short of it?

Which is more hypocritical – upholding a moral standard of behavior even while acknowledging your own inability to live up to it at times, or ripping conservatives for behavior that would receive nowhere near the same level of attention if perpetrated by a liberal (as proven by Ted Kennedy, Gerry Studds, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton and many others) purely for partisan reasons?

Which is more hypocritical – holding people accountable for their misdeeds, or reacting with mock outrage over behavior that you otherwise think fine and dandy, except for the fact that someone of the opposite party did it and so you see a chance to exploit it for political advantage? (If Craig had received his fellatio in the Oval Office as Clinton did, I presume Democrats would be fine with it.)

And finally, which is more hypocritical – getting the resignation of elected officials who besmirch their offices and embarrass their constituents and their party, or defending them to the hilt (Clinton), repeatedly re-electing them (Kennedy, Studds) and promoting them to party leadership (Frank and Kennedy)?

Whatever the faults of the Republican Party and its elected officials, the last people who have any right to throw stones are Democrats. And for them to do so is far more disturbing than whatever may have happened in an airport bathroom, unsettling as that is. For the former has the capacity to affect many more people than just those who are traveling, need to relieve themselves and happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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