Senator Larry Craig’s Wide Stance Stall is Set to Return to the Spotlight

Abdon M. Pallasch, The Chicago Sun-Times, June 7, 2008

It’s a bathroom door the GOP would rather keep closed.

Thousands of members of the international media will have to walk past it when they land at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul at the end of the summer.

Many will feel obligated to stop and file a story.

For the party that bills itself as stronger on family values than the Democrats, it likely will prove an unwelcome distraction.

In June of last year, Republican U.S. Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho was arrested and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after an undercover police officer conducting a sting in the bathroom — which had a reputation for gay hook-ups — said Craig looked into his stall, sat in the adjacent stall, tapped his foot under the divider and reached under the stall.

Craig responded that he just had a “wide stance,” was “not gay” and only pleaded guilty to avoid a spectacle that would spread from Minneapolis to Idaho.

Craig tried to withdraw his guilty plea, but an appeals court turned him down. The Senate’s ethics panel reprimanded Craig for his conduct and said it did not believe his denials.

The parade of airport tourists asking for directions to the stall (right at the Chili’s, left at the Royal Zino shoeshine) has died down a bit since last summer, but is expected to pick up as the GOP and the press arrive in town in late August, whether or not Craig himself shows up as a delegate.

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