Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Thank You for Your Support, Senator Craig

I just saw Senator Larry Craig complain to Matt Lauer that he fell prey to police profiling, when he was arrested in a Minneapolis restroom earlier this year.
Matt Lauer: So, again, the fact these motions seem to replicate a well-established sequence of signals for soliciting anonymous sex, it's a coincidence?

Larry Craig: I now know that this cop is-- this officer is a profiler. He said looking into a stall was one of it. And then a hand gesture or a foot tap is another one … Now I know all about profiling. I know what people feel like when they're profiled. When innocent people get caught up in what I was caught in as an innocent person, it's very angering at times.
That sounds like a pretty explicit criticism of profiling to me, don't you think?

Question is, will Craig (and other conservatives) now come out (so to speak) as strong opponents of profiling? And not just gay-sex-in-public-restrooms profiling, but racial profiling? Terrorist profiling? Will he become an outspoken critic of the Patriot Act?

If so, maybe some of my friends will actually be able to pass through an airport in the future without getting pulled aside every time for special attention just because, say, they were born in Afghanistan or their parents were born in India. (Never mind that no one from either country attacked us on 9/11. Never mind the fact that India's not even a Muslim country.)

Oh, and I expect Craig to remain a strong critic of this sort of bathroom profiling/entrapment, whether he believes homosexuality itself to be immoral or not. Because he'll want to remain ethically consistent. Right?

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