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The pages involved were all above the legal age of consent in Washington, D.C. It wasn't exactly pederasty either, given that we have no evidence (at least not yet) of any actual sexual contact between two live human beings. Sexual harassment? It doesn't appear that, at the time of the now-infamous instant messages, the pages were in Foley's employ. The best phrase I have been able to come up with for Foley's transgression is "virtual pederasty," with a large dose of extremely creepy and abusive behavior toward younger, vulnerable people whose trust he clearly betrayed.
Gay men, of course, went into a defensive crouch. Like Jews watching the Abramoff scandal, we winced at what we knew would be a collective blame-game. It always happens. There is no connection between homosexuality and an attraction to teenage boys--or at least, no more than there is between male heterosexuality and an attraction to teenage girls. But we know that, whenever a gay man is discovered in any relationship with a much younger man, the old pedophile smear will emerge, as, of course, it did in this case. This was not, in other words, "good for the gays."
Some comforted themselves with the thought that it wasn't good for the Republicans either. And there is some comfort there--purely on the hypocrisy front. The fact that, at the moment, it appears that the only law Foley may have broken was one he himself had helped pass is especially poignant. (The pages involved were of legal age according to the District of Columbia, but minors by the standard of an online predation law Foley championed.) There was even a video clip of Foley grandstanding with "America's Most Wanted." "If I were one of these sickos," he told the world, "I'd be nervous." Clearly not nervous enough.
The piling on that is now gleefully urged on by the Dems and the MSM is ironic. Had the GOP outed Foley, the Gotcha Gang would have howled about "gay bashing." Now they're howling about hypocrisy. Coming from the Dem/MSM RICO-crew, being called a hypocrite is like being called ugly by a frog.
When we were in DC, a senior Republican Senator from Utah had an Administrative Assistant who was gay. We were told this by a gay AA for a senior Dem senator. So Sullivan has a point when he points out the Repub double-standard for gays, appreciating them as smart, dedicated party workers while opposing gay rights to appease the farther reaches of the right wing of the GOP:
There is something deeply sick about a Republican elite that is comfortable around gay people, dependent on gay people, staffed by gay people--and yet also rests on brutal exploitation of homophobia to win elections at the base. These public homophobes, just like the ones in the Vatican, may even tolerate gay misbehavior more readily than adjusted gay people do. If you treat gay sex in any form as a shameful secret to keep concealed, the line between adult, consensual contact and the sexual exploitation of the young may not seem so stark. That's how someone like Speaker Dennis Hastert could have chosen not to know: He was already choosing not to know Foley was gay. In this way, Hastert is a milquetoast, secular version of Cardinal Bernard Law.
Many in the GOP have overcome this shame. The Log Cabin Republicans, for example, have shown how gay people can operate in conservative politics without having to be embarrassed, screwed up, or pathological. Some Republican senators--John McCain, Gordon Smith, Arlen Specter--seem able to deal with gay people and gay issues forthrightly, even if they do not support full gay equality.
But such honesty is scarce in this White House and this Congress. The miserable example of Mary Cheney, Stepford daughter, shows the full force of this syndrome. It isn't pretty. It depends upon knowing when to be silent, tip-toeing around bigotry, and shilling for people who may be personally accepting but publicly so in debt to the religious right that they cannot even formally speak the word "gay" in public.
It is this deeper, more nuanced hypocrisy that this episode exposes. The closet tolerants--and they include both the president and vice president--exist in a party that has built its electoral machine on systematic intolerance and the fueling of populist fear of homosexuals. This edifice cannot stand indefinitely, and the sudden collapse of Mark Foley's career may be a portent of what is to come. The old manners of GOP Washington are being buffeted by the countervailing currents of gay mainstreaming and political opportunism. At some point, Republicans are going to have to choose between the two.
The Natural Law and Christian doctrine oppose homosexuality as a sin against God and Nature. This choice will take a long while to implement, whatever side is chosen.
In the meantime, the other party, which has no philosophy except relativism and no real adherence to religion as having a role in political life, will play both sides against the middle---hyping as hypocritical GOP compassion and inclusiveness while at the same time trashing Repub beliefs in a moral and religious universe.
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