“In an effort to help Sen. Larry Craig, the American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that people who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy. Craig, of Idaho, is asking the Minnesota Court of Appeals to let him withdraw his guilty plea to disorderly conduct stemming from a bathroom sex sting at the Minneapolis airport. The ACLU filed a brief Tuesday supporting Craig. It cited a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms ‘have a reasonable expectation of privacy.’ That means the state cannot prove Craig was inviting an undercover officer to have sex in public, the ACLU wrote. The Republican senator was arrested June 11 by an undercover officer who said Craig tapped his feet and swiped his hand under a stall divider in a way that signaled he wanted sex. Craig has denied that, saying his actions were misconstrued. The ACLU argued that even if Craig was inviting the officer to have sex, his actions wouldn’t be illegal. ‘The government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Senator Craig was inviting the undercover officer to engage in anything other than sexual intimacy that would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom,’ the ACLU wrote in its brief.” — Yahoo (US)

You probably recall that in June 2007 Senator Craig was arrested for allegedly soliciting gay sex in an airport restroom. PervScan nearly ran a story about it at the time. The arresting officer taped his interview with Senator Craig, and you could hear it online. The officer becomes very indignant when Senator Craig denies any lewd conduct. The whole thing was a farce. It’s not like Senator Craig was jeopardizing national security or molesting children. At worst, he was looking for an airport pickup. Big fucking deal.

The ACLU is taking an interesting approach to the case. Rather than deny that Senator Craig may have been soliciting sex, the ACLU is arguing that such solicitations do not amount to lewd conduct. The idea is that, when two people go cottaging in a bathroom, they don’t bang each other in plain view of all. They do it in a toilet stall — where there is, according to the ACLU, a reasonable degree of privacy. Is it really anybody else’s business whether you piss, shit, jerk off, or blow a stranger in there?

The answer to that question involves a subtle distinction. Is a toilet stall a place whose purpose is excretion? Or is it a private place that happens to contain a toilet? Suppose you want to eat a baloney sandwich in a toilet. If legally it’s a place whose purpose is excretion, you’d be breaking the law eating something in there. That would be absurd. People do all sorts of things in toilets: read, talk on phones, cut fingernails, change clothes. Nobody gets arrested for those. Consequently, a toilet stall is just a private place that happens to contain a toilet. But if that’s the case, why can’t you fuck in there? Plainly there is only one answer to that: puritanism.

It seems like the only sensible approach is to treat the toilet stall as a private place, a “rest station.” Morality should not dictate whether you use it for shitting, fucking, or eating a bowl of corn flakes. Morality should pertain to leaving it like you found it — clean. Don’t leave unholy messes on the seat; don’t pee (or cum) on the floor; don’t clog the pipes with bloody tampons; don’t forget to flush or clean the rim when you have diarrhea; don’t use up all the paper and leave the next person stranded; and so on… After all, imagine two toilets: one left by horny strangers who abide by these simple rules of etiquette, another left by a lone straight person who violates even one of them. Which would you prefer to use?

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