The Foleygate Follies continue - oh, but we do love a sex scandal (it beats Bush torture and Abramoff bribery every time)

1. A Psychotherapist on the Hysteria Over Foley
The Radical Right, the Myth of the Gay Child Abuser and You
By CAROL NORRIS

As soon as the Foley story broke, I knew it was just a matter of time. Sure enough, The People for the American Way reported that Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, said the real concern about Foley's sexual predatory behavior toward an underage congressional page is "the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse." Not just Perkins, many other right wing mouthpieces are disgorging similar rhetoric.

The radical right, at the helm of its mighty cutter boat, the U.S.S. Wedge Issue, is chipping and tacking its way through the towns and psyches of our country yet again. I'd yawn at such a hackneyed conflation - homosexuality equals child sexual abuse - but those guys'll take advantage of any opening they can get and I feel sure they'd ram the bow of their boat right through my mouth on its way to the voting booths in November. Besides, I know that cutter can do some serious damage.

Perkins goes on to say that ignoring the "homosexuality issue" got the Catholic Church in trouble and now it's getting the House GOPs in a big mess.

He's right. Ignoring issues is dangerous. I'm a psychotherapist who has worked with child sexual abusers, as well as many, many child sexual abuse survivors. I'm legally mandated to report any child abuse, be it sexual, physical, emotional maltreatment or neglect. I don't have to know for sure, I just need to have a reasonable suspicion. And I only have 36 hours after I suspect or find out to report it. It's serious business. One that no therapist worth her license could legally, ethically or morally fathom ignoring.

But hoping we're too busy wrapping plastic wrap and duct tape around our children to protect them from the homosexual menace and terrorist threats to notice, ignoring is precisely what Perkins and the right wing crew are doing. They're ignoring the child abuse that's happening repeatedly in Congressional chambers and corporate board rooms. The abuse happens via the laws that are passed allowing corporations to poison the air and water and food we expect our children and their children to breathe, drink and eat. It happens when our leaders allow our corporations to come into our schools and sell our children unhealthy soft drinks and junk food as they suppress studies that show how harmful much of our processed foods are. It happens when advertisers are allowed to inundate our children with endless ads teaching them to want more, more, more, rather than letting them know they are inherently enough already, helping them grow into psychologically secure adults. It happens when we take away school lunch programs for the poor, when we make it harder and harder for our children to get student loans, and when we take away the workplace rights of parents, making it more and more difficult for them to provide for their children. And our current occupations have wreaked untold physical, psychological and emotional abuse on an entire generation of Afghan and Iraqi children, breeding fear and hatred and hopelessness.

Bill by bill, law by law, it seems our leaders are well-practiced at ignoring child abuse. Why would the sexual abuse of a congressional page be any different? Because somehow it is. Little else stirs such a deep chord of moral outrage within us, pulling at our instincts to protect our children, as when we think of an adult sexually abusing a child. And while Hastert et al. are not legally mandated to report child sexual abuse, that they could know--or reasonably suspect such an egregious violation was happening in their place of work--and not take steps to protect the victims is remarkable. That they didn't feel a moral mandate their consciences wouldn't allow them to ignore and impel them to intervene speaks volumes about their priorities and their motivations, as well as their fears.

Were I the parent or a loved one of one the pages, I would feel outraged and betrayed. Being a citizen who demands that my leaders step into their humanity and beyond self-interested politics when an issue as serious as this begs for it, I feel outraged and betrayed, yet not surprised. And, I'd be writing these same words were it a Democrat who allegedly perpetrated this abuse. Our children's safety and well-being are not the stuff of a political match. Ever.

Let's get some child abuse facts straight.

Child sexual abuse (and sexual abuse in general) usually has nothing to do with sex, but with power and control.

Child sexual abuse takes many forms and is not just about touch and penetration. You don't have to be in the same room with a child to sexually abuse him or her. Whether it is cyber, verbal or physical, it's serious and should be taken seriously. You can't possibly pretend to know how an email exchange from an older, more powerful adult will impact each kid.

Adolescents, even if on the cusp of stepping into their sexual selves or if already there, can be profoundly psychologically impacted by sexual abuse. Same with adults.

Child sexual abuse cuts across all strata of the population.
Having said that, studies show that men sexually abuse children more then women and most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by straight, not gay, men.

The majority of child sexual abuse happens not by the stranger on the street your mother tells you not to talk to, but by someone you know--a trusted family member, a neighbor, a congressman down the hall.


Not only is the gay-man-as-child-abuser myth as worn and tired as it is hateful and damaging, in this case it's such an obvious attempt at, "Hey, look over there at the gay sex pervert and not over here at the mechanisms that helped create the scandal and at us who covered it up," it's almost pitiable.

The subject brings up many an offshoot issue that isn't within the scope of this article. And, I haven't seen Foley in therapy, of course, so I don't pretend to know the depths of his psyche. But that isn't the issue. What matters is that we take Perkins' advice and not ignore the "homosexuality issue."

Let's ask our congressional Democrats to take this opportunity to speak out against gay stereotyping. Let's let them know that we expect more of them than just seeing the Foley incident as yet another Republican scandal set to help them in the upcoming midterm elections.

Better yet, let's all of us: Independents, Democrats, Republicans, Greens, teachers, preachers, parents, gays, straights, bisexuals, you name its, and each person reading, seize this opportunity ourselves as a teachable moment. Let's not ignore what they want us to ignore. Let's take this occasion to speak out and say that not only is the cover up and thus the aiding and abetting of sexual abuse as wrong as the abuse itself, but let's talk about the fact that Foley's actions are not so much the act of a gay man, but the act of a troubled human being in a system that actively discourages help and transparency. Let's all be mouthpieces that say we're too smart to buy into such an insultingly thinly-veiled, homophobic diversionary tactic. Let's talk about how Congress and Perkins and the self-interested radical right folks riding the choppy political waters on the U.S.S. Wedge Issue are busily ignoring the real issues, and in so doing not only gay men, but our children and each and every one of us the world over are done inexcusable harm.

If you are a child being sexually abused and need confidential help, call: National Child Abuse Hotline: 800.422.4453. If you are an adult at risk for sexually abusing a child, or a friend or family member of a sexual abuser and need confidential help, call Stop It Now!: 888.773.8368

(Carol Norris is a psychotherapist and freelance writer. Her articles and thoughts can be found on her tragically moribund, but one-day-soon to be resurrected blog: http://carolnorris.blogs.com)


2. The Gay Problem in the GOP -- by David Link

The tragic opera of former congressman Mark Foley is the revenge of don't ask, don't tell.

Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned Friday after e-mails and instant messages between him and several teenage congressional pages surfaced. The Republican leadership knew that at least one page had gotten e-mails where Foley admired the body of one of the page's friends, and asked the page for a picture of himself, e-mails the page naturally found sick and a bit creepy.

Republican leaders responded to the potential political problem by telling Foley to knock it off. With respect to the larger issue, though, there was no asking or telling. The boy's own revulsion at the obviously inappropriate attention was ignored, not only by Foley's partisan fellows, but by some news outlets that also had seen the e-mails.

If this has a familiar ring, look in the Catholic Church for the bell. Republican leadership was acting like the Catholic hierarchy, which played shell games with men accused of sexually abusing children. And there's a good reason for the similarity. The inability to deal straightforwardly with gay people leads to other kinds of truth-avoidance when things go south. But that's what comes from not wanting to know something, and going out of your way to remain ignorant.

We've come a long way since homosexuals had two basic options: the closet or jail. But a good portion of the electorate, most of them Republican, still seems to long for the good old days when we didn't have to think about ``those people." Both Libertarians and, generally, the Democratic Party have withdrawn their official support for the closet over time. States, too, are seeing what a losing battle this is, and allowing homosexuals to live their lives in conformity with, rather than opposition to, the law.

But that leaves Republicans and the religious right trying to live a 1950s lie in the new millennium. As Foley prepared in 2003 to run for the Senate, newspapers in Florida and elsewhere published stories about his homosexuality. But you'd never hear any of his colleagues saying such a thing. And Foley himself refused to discuss the issue, until his lawyer acknowledged Wednesday that the former congressman is indeed gay.

Being in the closet is hard to pull off without help, and for years Foley was eagerly abetted by his Republican brethren, whose willful blindness is at the heart of the current tragedy. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, majority leader John Boehner, and others in the House leadership are still under the impression that the closet, like Tinkerbell, will continue to live as long as we all believe. And believe, they do -- against all the evidence.

But the number of people who believe in the closet is declining day by day and generation by generation. Hastert and the rest of his cronies are their own victims. The political turmoil they caused for themselves is only just.

But their failure to acknowledge the obvious reality has other victims as well: the boys whom Foley apparently pursued. Some of the messages show some tolerance of Foley's advances, but not much more. This was no one's ``Summer of '42." The healthy disgust in one boy's use of the word ``sick" repeated 13 times seems about right.

But what can one expect from denying grown men -- and women -- a normal, adult sex life? Whether the denial of adult intimacy comes from religious conviction or the ordinary urge toward conformity, people who run away from their sexuality nearly always have to answer to nature somehow. For people who fear abiding and mutual love, the trust and confusion of the young is a godsend. Add to that the perquisites of power, and a degenerate is born.

Fortunately for the arc of justice, the closet ultimately works against itself. Foley's case and the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal are the last screams of the dinosaurs. It took the dinosaurs a long time to finally die off, or evolve into creatures that could continue to survive, and the same will be true of the closet's final supporters. But they will look more and more ridiculous each time that they take pride in holding up the ruins of this particular antiquity while tending to the wounded when the building again collapses.

Like the Catholic Church, the Republican Party in Washington guarantees its own future calamities in its enduring and steadfast habit of pretending that, unlike heterosexuality, homosexuality can be either denied or suppressed.

(David Link is a writer and attorney in Sacramento, and a member of the Independent Gay Forum.)


3. The Opposition Party Finally Draws the Line...
Democrats: Yes to War, No to Pedophilia!
By SHARON SMITH

At last, Congressional Democrats have answered critics who claim that they have forgotten how to behave as an opposition party. Party leaders have finally launched a searing attack against a criminal outrage that has gone on for three long years-while vowing to take down all Republican leaders responsible for the deception and subsequent cover-up.

These courageous Democrats are finally regaining the moral high ground-miraculously, without sacrificing their unswerving orientation to the Republicans' voting base in this election year.

After all, what sane person doesn't oppose pedophilia?

Ex-House Republican Mark Foley is, of course, drowning in his own hypocrisy. Foley's "smoking gun," the email address "maf54", used for sexual discourse with minors since at least 2003, is set to join the Clinton cigar in historical infamy. Just as President Clinton was likely engaging in extra-marital sex when he signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, Foley was attempting to seduce under-age boys while he co-chaired the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus.

Just over two months ago, President Bush signed the Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, a tough new law against sex offenders--spearheaded by Foley. "We track library books better than we do sexual predators," Foley commented in 2005, justifying the stringent new regulations that lump together violent rapists with harmless viewers of Internet pornography. Also in 2005, Foley described as "disgusting" and "sick" that some former sex offenders could obtain Viagra through Medicare.

Now Foley will be required under the terms of the legislation he sponsored to register for life as a sex offender-when he gets out of jail. And perhaps he will be ineligible for Viagra when he reaches retirement age.


End of an era?

The downfall of Foley, who won the first of his six terms in the 1994 Republican electoral sweep helmed by Newt Gingrich's obsession with "family values", might just provide the final straw that ends this despicable era.

Politicians of both parties who have imposed punitive "family values" legislation on the rest of us clearly do not practice them. Gingrich himself is now on his third marriage, having served his first wife with divorce papers at her hospital bed as she recovered from cancer surgery in 1981, in order to marry his then-mistress. He phoned his second wife on Mother's Day 1999 to request a divorce, in order to marry his next mistress.

The significance of the Foley scandal has not yet registered with the White House, however. When questioned on October 2 about Foley's escapades, White House spokesman Tony Snow responded dismissively, "I hate to tell you, but it's not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill. And there have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply naughty e-mails."

To be sure, the negligence of Republican powerbrokers in reacting to evidence of Foley's foibles has added new meaning to the term, "do-nothing Congress." Foley, a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, who was appointed House Deputy Whip by the since-indicted Tom De Lay, has friends in high places.

Last year, a 16-year old former Congressional page reported to his Louisiana sponsor, Republican Rep. Rodney Alexander, that the 52-year-old Foley's sexually-charged emails "freaked me out," telling Alexander that Foley's email request for his photo was "sick, sick, sick, sick, sick."

Alexander did not report this information to the police or FBI, but went instead to Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), in charge of House Republican 2006 election campaigns. Foley has been among the largest single contributors, giving the NRCC $330,000 in less than three years-an amount that has more than tripled since Reynolds became NRCC chairman.

Reynolds claimed that he informed House Speaker Dennis Hastert of the allegations, yet on September 30, Hastert claimed he did not "recollect" being notified.


Defending the indefensible

Not surprisingly, Newt Gingrich defended the Republican leadership's non-response in an Oct. 1 interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday . Wallace asked, "But during all those months, they left Foley in the House Republican leadership. They left him as the head of the congressional caucus dealing with exploited children."

To which the notoriously anti-gay Gingrich responded, "I think had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would have also been accused of gay bashing. I mean, the original notes had no sexual innuendo and the parents did not want any action taken."

Without for a moment minimizing the vile acts of Mark Foley, it is shameful that Congressional Democrats have staked their election-year strategy as an "opposition party" around opposing the acts of a lone Republican sexual predator, while assisting Republicans in whipping up a bi-partisan xenophobic frenzy.

In the final days of this pre-election Congressional session (before breaking for five-weeks of campaigning), 12 Senate Democrats joined 53 Republicans to endorse Bush's anti-terrorism legislation intended to allow evidence acquired through torture. Twenty-six Democrats (including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) also joined Republicans to overwhelmingly pass a draconian bill calling for construction of a 700-mile wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, in a vote of 80 to 19.

On November 7, voters will unfortunately be left with no choice other than to kick the Republican "bums" out, only to be replaced by the bums of the pseudo-opposition party. A genuine third-party has never been more desperately needed.

(Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States. She can be reached at: sharon@internationalsocialist.org)


4. Outrage as Misdirection
The Real Scandal Isn't Foley
By DAVE LINDORFF

It's a sad commentary on the state of American democracy, on the instincts of the American citizenry, and on the standards and judgment of the American newsmedia that the unsavory advances of a pathetic Forida congressman can have the nation in high dudgeon, while the ramming through of a patently illegal piece of legislation undermining a crucial 13th century civil liberty (habeas corpus), and the Fourth and Eighth Amendments of the constitution, and the secret planning for an illegal and catastrophic attack on Iran, both merit almost no complaint or mention.

Far be it from me to complain if Rep. Mark Foley's sexual obsession with teenage boys ends up sinking Republican hopes for hanging onto the House and Senate. But how sad that it would be if it is this, and the coverup of his crimes by the Republican leadership, that undoes the Bush administration, when its real crimes are of such grandeur and seriousness?

How are we to compare seeking to screw a 16-year old with totally screwing the Constitution? How are we to compare secret email solicitations with a secret plot to attack a nation of 62 million that poses no immediate threat to the U.S.?

How are we to compare the Republican Party's cover-up of a member's efforts to corrupt young pages with the same party's conspiracy to cover up the Bush administration's ineptness and possible foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks, and of the campaign of lies and misinformation it used to drum up hysteria for an illegal and totally unwarranted invasion of Iraq?

How are we to compare the media feeding frenzy over the Foley scandal with the profound silence about Bush's Iran invasion planning, and with the deliberate brownout about information regarding a growing popular movement to impeach the president for his crimes?

And finally, how to we to compare the public revulsion over Foley's indiscretions with the widespread acceptance or, or even support for abuse of American captives in the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and the so-called "War" on Terror, which has included rape, sodomy, sexual humiliation and torture of all kinds, and murder--especially when it is known that the vast majority of those captives were either guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or of simply being honest fighters for their respective countries, deserving of decent treatment under the Geneva Convention, and of a fair hearing into the propriety of their detention?

What kind of nation have we become?

At least the Foley saga makes it clear why the farcical impeachment of Bill Clinton for his extramarital escapade moved forward through the House to a Senate trial, while George Bush, whose crimes far exceed those of any president before him, including Richard Nixon, and place the whole American experiment in jeopardy, has not even faced censure, much less a bill of impeachment.

Democratic Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should be ashamed of themselves for leaping so boldly to the attack over Foley's crime and the Republican leadership's cover-up, while continuing to assert that there will be no effort to impeach the president for his own crimes even if they manage, with Foley's assistance, to wrest control of the House November 8.

The American media should be ashamed of themselves for wallowing in swill, when there is a cancer in the White House that is attacking the very foundations of the nation.

The American public should be ashamed for its sheer inanity and inattention to the responsibilities of citizenship.

(Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky. He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com)