By now you've heard all the "wide stance" stance and "Grand Old Potty" jokes about the Republican senator from Idaho, Larry Craig, who tried to solicit gay sex in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and got busted by police. The details of the incident are tacky and tawdry, for sure (we're no fans of adultery), but that's not what's truly disturbing about this story.

First, if we're to believe that Craig was indeed scoping the john for a Joe Blow (he did, after all, plead guilty), there's the despicable hypocrisy of a politician who's been anti-gay rights on any legislation that's passed his way, as outlined by William Saletan on Slate.com. But we've come to expect that from staunch family values thumpers. Worse is the double-standard of his fellow teammates, who went after him like an angry mob for his potentially adulterous indiscretions, and yet let heterosexual Republican Senator David Vittner off the hook: his name turned up on the D.C. madam's list of clients, so why is he still a senator, asks Sandip Roy on Salon.com. Only in a fundamentalist country like the United States can sexual preference still be considered an issue of morality, one that can affect all other unrelated aspects of your life, like your career, explains Philip Hensher in the UK's Independent (reflecting much of the rest of the evolved Western world's response to this debacle). And here's another important question posed by Arianna Huffington: In the age of terror, isn't busting toe-tappers an insane use of our law enforcement resources? Yes! When are we going to learn to separate (consensual, adult) sex and government? Maybe when we can finally learn (or re-learn) how to separate church and state. Until then, this isn't just a gay issue to be fought by gays. If we want to preserve our own sexual rights, then we have to fight for everyone's.