Friday, October 06, 2006
Editorial: Stake out the gay scapegoat
Suggestions that fear of offending gays might have thwarted House action against Foley are ludicrous -- and pernicious.
From the RoundTable blog
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Faced with a scandal, allegations of a coverup and the perception that hypocrisy ranks high on the GOP "values" agenda, Republican stalwarts have rushed to identify the evil that protected former Rep. Mark Foley for so long.
It's the gays.
Yes, that's right, Republican House leaders supposedly did not want to act on reports about Foley's sexually explicit e-mails to underage male pages because the party leadership didn't want to appear homophobic.
Never mind that a large part of the GOP strategy for winning the White House in the last presidential election was to get anti-gay marriage amendments on state ballots to turn out the party's conservative religious base.
Never mind that Republicans dredge up debate about a similar federal amendment whenever the first sign of an election peeks up over the political horizon.
Never mind all their rhetoric about how gays might be tolerated, but never accepted, and how legalizing gay relationships would erode traditional marriages.
To confront reports that a closeted gay congressman was making creepy advances on teenage House employees -- now that would have risked offending. House leaders wouldn't have wanted to look like they were doing anything so politically incorrect as gay-bashing.
Yeah, right.
Given the Republican grip on power, taking rhetorical shots at gays, it seems, could not be more politically correct.
The excuse is disgusting not just because it is insultingly far-fetched, but even more because it seeks to change the public debate about Foley's offense. It is not about gay rights.
Foley's lurid e-mails would have been as repugnant had he sent them to young women rather than young men. The scandal is not over his sexual orientation, but his inappropriate interest in adolescents.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert's political life stands in danger of being swept away over questions about when he learned of Foley's transgressions and what the speaker did, or failed to do, to put an end to them. To suggest that he was more worried about offending gays than protecting children is damning, but hardly credible.
The suggestion itself is based on a presumption that gays would object to protecting children from adult sexual predators -- that homosexuality and pedophilia somehow go hand in hand -- a prejudice that does smack of homophobia.
How much more believable to theorize that if Republican leaders ignored Foley's embarrassing misbehavior, it was not to protect a homosexual but his seat and the party's majority in the House.
