Pat Buchanan's view of the Larry Craig affair surprises me.

While I hardly think of Buchanan as a compassionate conservative or a liberal bleeding heart, he has more compassion for Craig than most compassionate conservatives or bleeding heart liberals. Anyway, as regular readers know, I'm drawn to analyzing contradictions like this, because I have this side of me that always wants to learn something new. Perhaps it's an addiction, but I just cannot ignore Buchanan's piece, titled "The Friends of Larry Craig."

Buchanan starts by observing that "rarely has a United States senator fallen so fast from grace or been so completely abandoned," which couldn't be more true. Gays, straights, leftist, rightists, centrists. Outside of a few individualistic libertarian bloggers, his best known defenders seem to be Adrianna Huffington....

And Buchanan, whose outspokenly conservative moral views are well known. Buchanan sees no contradiction between his views and showing compassion, nor does he think that Craig is necessarily a hypocrite for partaking in conduct he condemns. Rather, he thinks Craig might just be unable to control himself:

....even assuming Craig has led a second and secret life, would that automatically make him a hypocrite, a fraud, an Elmer Gantry?

Is there no possibility a man can believe in traditional morality, yet find himself tempted to behavior that morally disgusts him? Is it impossible Craig is driven by impulses, the biblical "thorn in the flesh," of which Paul wrote, to behavior he almost cannot control?

Why else would a United States senator take the incredible risk of disgracing himself and humiliating his family, and ending his career, for a few minutes of anonymous sex in an airport men's room?

Is every alcoholic who falls off the wagon a hypocrite if he has tried to warn kids of the evil of alcohol? Many men have tried to live good lives and fallen again and again. They are called sinners.

Yet, if the charges are true, and it appears they are, Larry Craig has worse personal problems than his impending loss of office.

And how have his colleagues responded?

Republicans immediately denounced him, stripped him of all his seniority rights, and ordered an ethics committee investigation and a study of whether more immediate action should be taken.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that the Buchanan view is right, and homosexuality is a sin, something inherently wrong. Why wouldn't there be just as much compassion for that sin as there would be for other sins? Adultery, after all, is listed in the Ten Commandments, but does anyone imagine that Larry Craig would have been forced out of office had he cheated on his wife with another woman? What makes the foot-tapping so uniquely and singly awful and despicable that all of Craig's colleagues so totally abandoned him?

I think the answer lies not in what we call biblical morality, but the inherently Machiavellian nature of politics. (At least, what most people would call the Machiavellian nature of politics.) It's easy to forget, though, that even Machiavelli recognized the vital importance of loyalty; he believed that any leader who didn't would regret it. Because of their failure to display any loyalty to one of their own, Republicans fail as biblical moralists, and as Machiavellian moralists.

After describing the coldhearted manner in which Romney threw Craig under the bus, Buchanan closes with advice from a famous Machiavellian:

Count your friends when you're down, Nixon always advised.

Anyway, hypocrisy can take many forms. Those conditional loyalists we call "fair weather friends" are, IMO, a lot more hypocritical than people who partake of things they consider sinful.

But regarding sin, I'm still intrigued by the notion of homosexuality as "the biblical 'thorn in the flesh,' of which Paul wrote."? Was it? I don't know, as I'm not a theologian, and I'd be willing to bet there's an enormous range of opinion by religious scholars who have studied the passage to death. But if it was Paul's thorn, might that have been part of the reason he condemned it anew, in the New Testament? Doesn't that still beg the question of why it would be sinful? It's easy to say that Paul was simply following Leviticus, but who was the author of that? God or Moses? And what does it mean? On whom is it binding? Anything missing in translation?

Does disagreement over such things go to the essence of Christianity? A lot of people think so, although I don't.

But is the argument over Craig's conduct really a religious one? I don't think so. Religious rhetoric is invoked to condemn Craig, while the same religious views are attacked in order to excuse his conduct. Yet his supposedly religious attackers won't forgive him (even though their religion says they should), and neither will those who would excuse his conduct but attack the views of those who won't forgive him. Both "sides" are thus in apparent agreement that Craig cannot be forgiven, the irony being that those who excuse his conduct won't forgive him unless he renounces his aversion to the thorn in his side!

Remarkable. And, frankly, unsolvable.

In all honesty, I don't know whether to call it religion or politics.

UPDATE: Here's more on the strange duality which makes the problem unsolvable:

For every social liberal who concludes that the Craig Affair undermines homophobia, there's a social conservative who'll take the opposite tack -- who'll see Craig as proof that homosexuality is something disgusting and perfidious. And the avalanche of press coverage fed the second attitude just as much as the first.

So where's Joseph Welch when you need him?

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links Gay Patriot, who has a must-read on the deliberately repressive dynamics of outing:

The “outers” define the meaning of hypocrisy to suit their purposes. Or maybe they’re just trying to put a highfalutin gloss to their own prurient passions, a strange fascination with the sexual behavior of a handful of their ideological adversaries and a perverse glee in making that public.

In yesterday’s Washington Post Marc Fisher wrote that such “work requires” the “outers” to “play God” (Via Michael Silence via Instapundit). As if they know better than the rest of us. An attitude not too different from that of religious zealots. Indeed, the very title of the column, focusing on the actions of blogger Michael Rogers, Who Among Us Would Cast the First Stone? This Guy suggests that Rogers has the same certainty of belief as do those judgmental voices on the religious right whom his allies on the left are ever eager to criticize.

Fisher is right to ask, “who elected him moral arbiter?” A question not too different than that many ask of social conservatives eager to label gay people sinners.

Like me, Fisher questions if these outings “liberate anyone” or if they “just add another bolt and chain to the closet door.”

I agree that these outings don’t accomplish much, but wonder at the religious zeal with which the outers attempt to make their case. For they seem to know how all gay people should vote on certain issues. Just as certain social conservatives seem to know how all people should express their sexuailty.

The worst aspect of this is that they end up uniting against sexual privacy, individual autonomy, and sexual freedom.

(An old rant for me.)