Profiling?

Mark Steyn makes an interesting point, as usual:

If Senator Craig had gone into the stall, rolled out his prayer mat, yelled "Allahu Akbar!" and been observed attempting to weaponize the ballcock, the undercover cop would have shrugged, "Do I really want to get stuck with another four-week stint in Sensitivity Training hell?" and gone about his business.

The construction is kind of awkward for a band, but "Weaponize the Ballcock" would be a great name for an album.

But I'm really surprised you can get arrested for "soliciting" gay sex--not offering to pay someone for it, just making gestures "understood" to be solicitations--in MINNEAPOLIS. I use the phrase "gay mecca of the Midwest" because it's faintly ironic (in the city of Mecca, gay people are beaten by the religious police), and because the more common "San Fran on the Mississippi" tars them with an anti-American brush I don't quite feel they deserve (some neighborhoods in St. Paul, OTOH...). Seriously, every gay Iowan I've known, except one who went to Colorado, has relocated to Minneapolis because there is a large gay community and the straights are more or less "enlightened." Their Pride festival is two weeks. The last time I was in downtown Minneapolis, a week before the Pride Festival, it was festooned with rainbow flags, and a gay club had two-story banners of shirtless men out front. Does this sound like a town that reviles gay people and/or homosexual acts?

Just seems like there would have been a test case built around someone arrested in a Mpls restroom at least ten years ago. Or maybe there was, and the straights aren't as "enlightened" as I've been led to believe.

(I'm also reminded of all the "George Bush's fascist Christian thug Gestapo is going to round up all the gays!" rhetoric I heard around Mpls and Iowa City around the 2004 election. Not sure why I'm not hearing that again this week, unless three years with no evidence sent it down the memory hole. Arresting a Republican as a cover is the sort of diabolical "Rovian" touch conspiracy theorists eat for breakfast.)

Weaponize the ballcock!