Idaho Senator Larry Craig, 62, who has voted against same-sex marriage, and other gay rights legislation, has plead guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from complaints of lewd conduct in a men’s room. The three-term senator, who is married, was arrested June 11, 2007 at the Minneapolis airport.

According to a Hennepin County, Minnesota court docket, Senator Craig pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge on August 8, 2007, paid $575 in fines and fees, and was put on unsupervised probation for a year. A sentence of 10 days in the county workhouse was stayed, and a charge of gross misdemeanor interference to privacy was dismissed.

Senator Craig, who is up for re-election next year, was a member of the House for 10 years before his election to the Senate in 1990, and was re-elected in 1996 and 2002. He hasn’t said whether he will run for a fourth term in 2008, and was expected to announce his plans in the fall.

Now Senator Craig’s political future may be in jeopardy, and it is uncertain if the Senator’s guilty plea will affect his re-election plans. Meanwhile, the Democrats smell homosexual hypocrite blood, and a spokesperson for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, Hannah August, has already said that this incident “has given Americans another reason not to vote Republican.”

Rumors about Senator Craig’s sexuality have been circulating since the 1980s, but those allegations, which the Senator calls ridiculous, have never been substantiated.

The so-called “family values” crowd, which is often heard making the very bold, but very wrong, assertion that homosexuality is a choice, apparently doesn’t realize that it’s heterosexuality which is chosen by homosexuals whose straight lifestyle choices do not actually make them straight. Desire is hard-wired from birth, so denying it for the sake of tradition is usually futile. Such denials have no benefit whatsoever in the 21st century, and ultimately do more harm than good.

Homophobia is a dying American tradition, along with anachronistic concepts of social conformity that have been going out of style since the late 1950s when folks began re-thinking the stifling constraints of post World War II era society.

Nowadays, for the most part, it’s okay to be gay. Unfortunately, there is still some political advantage in the opposition to gay rights, but a few more incidents like this one and “Foley Gate,” and speaking out in favor of “traditional family values” (which was never anything but a euphemism for homophobia, misogyny, racism, and dominionism) is going to become tantamount to public emergence from the gay old party’s closet.

It was never okay to be a hypocrite, regardless of sexual orientation. In matters of political fortune, the homosexual hypocrite sword still cuts both ways, but one of it’s edges is getting duller and duller, while the other remains razor sharp.