You never know where what you put up on the web will land.  Andrew Sullivan links to this lecture by James Alison titled "Love Your Enemy: Within A Divided Self"…

For people like me, Senator Craig is, in a very obvious sense, an enemy: he has been a solid functionary of the system of hatred which has used people like me as a wedge issue to frighten people into acquiescence with other, and far more serious forms of evildoing. A system of hatred which is, thank heavens, far less strong in this country now than it is in the United States, and far less strong than it was in this country as recently as fifteen years ago. I say this, since there is an obvious sense in which I, as a child of my culture, am tempted to rejoice in the discomfiture of my enemy, to depict Senator Craig as the “not me” which gives me a tidy little identity. It was in this context that I was very moved to read a piece by one of the gay-bloggers in the US, fairly shortly after the Craig story broke, which helped remind me of the truth of the Gospel.

This blogger, whose name I cannot now remember, showed me something which enabled me to see sameness rather than difference.

He pointed out that Senator Craig was born in 1945, in rural Idaho. When he was ten years old, in 1955, there was a scandal in Boise, the Idaho State Capital, not too far from where young Larry lived. It was the big tabloid gay scandal of the 1950’s, coming just as America was in the grip of the McCarthy witch hunts, themselves helped along nicely by at least two self-hating gay men, “killer fruits” as Truman Capote wrily called them: Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover. It was revealed that in Boise, of all unlikely places, there was a network of public officials and influential citizens employing the services of a group of rent boys. Well, you can imagine what sort of impact the news of all this, the sensation of it, the hatred it revealed, might have had on a ten year old boy. It might well have taught him that if he wanted to grow up being good, then the one thing, above all else, that he was not, was gay (or whatever approximation to that word existed in his milieu at that time). A boy like that might well have been taught by his culture, just as he came close to puberty, simultaneously who he was, and who he was not; and faced with any little boy’s desire to grow up to be good, he may have been locked into a form of denial and self-hatred which could then perpetuate itself for many years thereafter.

I can’t be sure, but I think that nameless gay blogger was probably me, Here.  At the time I was seeing some references to the issues Craig’s generation faced, but I’d also previously seen announcements come around one of the gay news lists I’m on about the Fall of ’55 Documentary, which reminded me of the book, Sex Crime Panic, about another one that happened, also in 1955, in Soux City Iowa, and I did a quick mental calculation of how old Craig probably was at the time of the scandal in his home state and sure enough there he was, just at the threshold of puberty when all of this was going down.  That generation had it a lot rougher then mine even, I’m about ten years younger then Craig, but some gay kids growing up in some parts of the country back then had it worse, if that’s possible to imagine.

The web’s a big place and who knows how many other gay bloggers, knowing about that documentary or about that scandal independently figured out its link with Larry Craig’s life and posted their thoughts for Alison to read, but nobody else I’d read up ’til I posted my piece as the story was developing had, or took the time to figure exactly how old he would have been.  I don’t get the kind of hits per day that Sullivan gets, or even the third or forth tier gay bloggers get, but I have have regular and semi-regular readers here, and many others who stop in via Google every day, and I see lots of email links in my server logs, as people find things here on the blog, and on my cartoon pages, that they want to share with others.  The point is, who knows where a thought that you put down in writing will go here on the web?

This is what the Internet has done for us, for the political and cultural dialogue among the everyday folk.  With so many active and curious minds roaming around the web to stumble across and behold the links between people and events that animate our times, we don’t have to wait for some Old Media gasbags to tell us what the connections are.  We find them, and ponder them for ourselves.