Alcoholics, gays, and Catholic priests all have a right to be indignant with Mark Foley. He has scapegoated them all. First he blamed his actions on alcohol, then on his homosexuality, then on his being molested by a “clergyman.” Foley is Catholic, so presumably the clergyman who purportedly molested him was not a Unitarian. But who knows? Maybe Unitarianism will come in for its share of the blame, as well.
Reading about this story, and especially listening to conservative commentary on the radio, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it stated or implied that Foley’s homosexuality and his predilection for teenage boys are somehow one and the same thing. Foley himself made the connection when he “came out” (apparently to himself, since everyone else on Capitol Hill seems to have known he was gay all along), thus implying that somehow because he is gay, he is also a pervert.
A conservative I listened to on the radio this morning, Andy Parks of WMAL, suggested that the FBI should conduct yearly deep background checks on all Congressmen to determine if they are gay or not. Under criticism from his co-host, he later drew back a little and said that he might be willing to let a Congressman’s sexual orientation remain a secret, but everything else was fair game. After all, if a Congressman has defaulted on a loan at some time in his life, that indicates a problem managing money, and therefore the Congressman might be susceptible to bribes.
Republicans just want to be all up in other people’s business. That’s a primary reason I’m not a Republican anymore; I have a strong Libertarian streak that gets ruffled when Republicans start preaching their superior morality.
The real eyebrow-raiser in Parks’ diatribe, however, was his suggestion that somehow homosexuality itself is cause for concern, because obviously, a homosexual congressman is going to be attracted to the teenage pages.
Equation of adult-oriented homosexuality and homosexual pedophilia is widespread in our culture, and the Foley scandal does not help clear up the distinction in the minds of most Americans. There is a difference: gay men are not necessarily attracted to teenage boys or boy children. Pedophilia is the disease, not the perpetrator’s homosexuality.
There is also a question whether or not Foley’s particular sexual fixation, or “fetich” as he called it in his IM, constitutes pedophilia. As William Buckley points out, Foley’s IM friends were all sixteen years or older, above the age of consent in D.C. and most states. If Foley had simply had sex with them, he probably could not be prosecuted as a pedophile. However, laws against the corruption of minors contradict laws governing consent to sex, and a minor can be “corrupted” until the age of eighteen. However, between sixteen and eighteen, any kind of sex, with a person of whatever age, is probably not prosecutable.
It may turn out that Foley knew this, since he served on a committee that wrote sex predator legislation. Perhaps he used his knowledge to his advantage. It seems to me unreasonable to suppose that he never at least attempted sex with the boys he courted. I think its likely he even succeeded. A man who is obviously, ostentatiously soliciting boys is likely going to get lucky once in awhile. And of course, his luck will also run out, eventually, as it did this week.
It’s interesting, too, to read the IM’s between Foley and his boy toys not only for the salacious content, but for what one finds between the lines. Limbaugh has been asking every day on his program, “Why did these pages save these IM’s? Who had them all these years?” Limbaugh believes the answer is that obviously this was a political hit job that Democrats have been cooking for five years or longer, and they were just waiting until the right moment to spring the trap (but why not spring it in 2002 or 2004?).
I believe the answer is simpler. By default, their IM program saved a chat log. Apple’s iChat saves chats by default. There is even a folder in a user’s Home directory where these are saved, labeled “Chats.”
This was no hit job. But I don’t believe these kids were babes in the woods, either. If you read the IM’s between Foley and Tyson Vivyan for example, what you discover is a young man who chats with Foley as a friend, not as a stereotypical “victim” of a sex predator. If Limbaugh wants to know why these pages did not come forward until now, the answer is not that they are part of a Democrat/media conspiracy. The answer, as Vivyan puts it, is that “he didn’t want to ruin his connection to a powerful Washington personality.”
Essentially, if he is to believed, he was using Mark Foley every bit as much as Foley was using him. Vivyan kept up a correspondence with Foley until he was 24. Foley obviously was not some violent sexual sadist whom Vivyan feared. He was just the quintessential dirty old man.
He still deserves everything that has happened to him, if nothing else because of his hypocrisy. ABC reported yesterday that in a moment of high dudgeon, Foley once tried to shut down a nudist colony in his Florida district because children nudists could mingle with adult nudists.
All in all, this is a great story that I am not yet tired of reading about. It has everything there is to love about a good Washington scandal: sex, Republicans, and a detailed electronic paper trail. It is not going away anytime soon, either, thanks to Hastert’s unwillingness to resign.
I still believe Hastert will resign. I’m predicting he will be gone by Friday next week, maybe sooner. However, when Hastert does resign, that probably won’t be the end of the scandal either. Congress has ordered hearings. The FBI is going to examine Foley’s computers, and you know someone will leak whatever they find. More Pages will come forward, hoping to get on TV to say how “shocked” they were by the Congressman’s behavior (pardon me if I don’t believe them). We can look forward to more IM’s and emails. The anticipation is just killing me.
