But when I read one of Foley's "naughty" IM conversations, my reaction was not horror, but sadness. For those of you who can stomach it, I suggest you read the conversation. It's a middle-aged man obsessed with sexuality, trying to impose his fantasies on a young kid who would rather just play sports. The kid keeps talking about lacrosse practice, and Foley keeps turning the conversation back toward sex. The kid claims to masturbate only 2-3 times a week, while Foley enthusiastically details how he does it every day. Although the boy seems not to mind Foley's come-ons, my guess is that he relishes the attention more than the sexual dynamic; I would not be surprised if the boy is not gay at all.
But Mark Foley is gay, quite clearly. Even his colleagues in Congress knew. And the fact that a successful middle-aged man went so long without revealing his sexuality - one of the most basic elements of his nature - is a clear indictment of the culture of repression in which he lived.
Who doubts that, if he had admitted his sexuality openly, Foley would have been finished as a Republican politician? That's exactly what happened to Sam Walls, James West, Edward Schrock, and a host of other Republicans. Hostility to homosexuality is one of the pillars of the Republican political philosophy; if you want to fight for lower taxes but you like having sex with other men, you'd better keep the latter under wraps.
I doubt Mark Foley is a pedophile. Real pedophiles don't go for 16-year-olds, they go for 11-year-olds. I might be wrong, but my guess is that Foley went for teenage boys because they were the only males around him who wouldn't respond to his advances by torpedoing his career.
A conservative friend of mine once told me that if the conservative movement sinks, it will be homophobia that sinks it. I wouldn't go that far. But there's a lot of men like Mark Foley out there - in the Republican Party, in the Catholic priesthood, but mostly just in the suburban house next door, who are attracted to men, but who keep that desire under wraps so they can keep their jobs in a fake little world that has been prepared for public consumption by our politicians and our media, a world where no man is gay.
I pity those men, and you, dear reader, should too.
As soon as our culture gets over the idea that a man having sex with a man is something disgusting or wrong, I have a feeling there will be a lot fewer pedophiles out there.
What Mark Foley did was wrong. He may have broken the law, and he'll undoubtedly be punished either way. But the real villain in this story is the Republican Party, a political institution that denies people's basic natures and forces them to skulk and sneak and hate themselves. A party that is rapidly becoming, in the words, of a news commentator, "a party of criminals and pedophiles." Those words are merely recent additions; "bigots" has been on the list for quite some time.
Update: Note that, although Republicans are the ones who created our public culture of homophobia, others are quick to jump on the bandwagon. In his Media Notes column, Howard Kurtz says:
Now that I've looked at the Foley IMs...I really wish journalists would stop using weasel words like "inappropriate" to describe them. They're not inappropriate, they're sickening. "Get a ruler and measure it for me." That sort of thing. So let's not pretty up something that is clearly ugly."Get out a ruler and measure it for me" is sickening? No it isn't. If my girlfriend said that to me in an online chat, I wouldn't grimace in revulsion - I'd get out the ruler. Maybe the fact that the boy was 16 is sickening. But does sickeningness suddenly turn to mere naughtiness on someone's 18th birthday? I'm not defending what Foley did, but I'm not sickened by it.
PS - On an unrelated note, read this article by Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz on how to fix the U.S.'s massive debt problems...
PPS - Check out this interesting blog post about American foreign policy and the idea of the middle class.
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