Art Neu: Craig Episode May Help End ‘Nonsense’ Of Social Issue Dominance

The unfolding story surrounding U.S. Sen. Larry Craig has reinforced former Iowa Lt. Gov. Art Neu’s view that the Republican Party should focus on economic and foreign policy issues, public-sphere matters of grave seriousness, rather than banking on values-posturing that so often exposes human frailty and outright hypocrisy.

What’s more, Neu, a Carroll attorney and something of an ambassador from an era of more civil politics — the days of Robert Ray’s governorship — said he thinks President Bush’s unpopularity and a cascade of scandals involving the “terrible” hypocrisy of social conservatives could crack open the door to an older-school Republican approach he and Ray represented in Iowa.

“I don’t think it’s necessary that candidates keep telling us what good Christians they are,” Neu said. “The people I knew in politics who were good Christians didn’t have to announce it.”

Neu said the primacy of social conservatism has been a poor approach for the Republican Party and government.

“I think we may be seeing the beginning of the end of that nonsense,” Neu said. “These things go in cycles.”

For Neu, the Craig episode also recalled some of his days as a U.S. Army attorney in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Neu, stationed in Washington, D.C., at the time, said he often was called on to represent alleged homosexuals who were being drummed out of the military. Many of those he represented were caught in situations similar to the one Craig, an Idaho Republican, is alleged to have been in on a June day at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Just like today’s arrests, Neu said, there were certain locations in the District of Columbia where law enforcement officials would arrest men seeking to engage in anonymous gay liaisons in the public restrooms.

“If you got someone in one of those places you knew you had them,” Neu said.

Neu said it fell to him, however, to attempt to defend the men allegedly involved in these circumstances, men the Army deemed to be security risks because of the suspected potential of blackmail and national security breaches during this period of the Cold War and Red Scare.

Often, the soldiers he represented had so much pent-up guilt associated with their homosexuality that they confessed, Neu said. Others have suggested this is the reason behind Craig’s guilty plea on disorderly conduct for allegedly seeking sexual interaction in a men’s restroom with what turned out to be an undercover officer.

“It (the Craig case) reminded me of that because apparently the police were watching this restroom in the Minneapolis airport,” Neu said.

For his part, nearly a half-century ago when he worked with these cases, Neu said he would put up spirited defenses on behalf his clients. But to no avail.

“The first one, I really put on a vigorous defense,” Neu said. “I had a psychiatrist. I had a priest. But I remember one of the presiding officers fell asleep.”

Neu said he could never overcome the military’s strong presumption of guilt and the homophobia of the time.

Nevertheless, he remembered attaining the rank of captain despite his lack of success in defending accused homosexuals.

“They promoted me because I was so good at losing,” he said sardonically.