What started as a longish email reply about the scandal that has led to the resignation of US Rep (Fl-R) Mark Foley is turning out into a full fledged post. The conversations I have been having with other people is about how this story is being framed.

I've been hearing the word "pedophile" and now the moniker "predatorgate" thrown around with much gusto by Democrats. The problem is, it has been also intertwined with the words "homosexual".

See, Mark Foley was a self-hating semi-closeted gay man who happens to have also had a fondness for stalking young pages all around Capitol Hill. The worse part? Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay and other republicans knew about it. For years. About five years to be exact. They did nothing about.

Yet because "pedophile" and "predator" are in collusion with "gay", this whole framing makes me nervous.

Queer activists, like my friend Michael Rogers of BlogActive, work hard to report on the enemies within their communities. That a man like Mark Foley could spend 19 years in a committed relationship with another man yet push forward the Defense of Marriage Act is just incredible. Without Michael's investigative reports we wouldn't have the background information necessary for making informed assessments on creeps like Foley.

One such close to brilliant assessment was Jeffrey Feldman's Hastert "Protected A Predator":

Fifty years from now, when historians write about the social problem of sexual predators in early 21st Century America, they will put a photo of Cardinal Bernard Law next to a photo of Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

These are men who had the chance to protect our children, but chose to protect a predator instead.

They did more than just fail as leaders--they endangered our families.

Like Cardinal Law, Hastert was the most powerful man in his Archdiocese--in this case, the United States Congress.

Like Cardinal Law, Hastert learned that a sexual predator was working for him--in this case a Congressman from Florida, not a parish priest.

And like Cardinal Law, Hastert chose to help the predator to protect the image of his organization instead of exposing the predator to protect America's children.

Protecting a sexual predator instead of protecting our children is a failure of leadership and a threat to the safety of America's families.

Jeffrey is going to get mad at me for calling this almost brilliant. Because as much as I would like to think this is about a creepy old guy hitting on young boys, I feel that Terrance Heath's take on the matter is more correct : This is about abuse of power.

I know I risk complicating this with more layers than may be advisable for the purpose of framing this politically, but there’s also a possibility to cast this this as an issue with abuse of power. It’s pretty straightforward, actually. Foley belongs to a party that wouldn’t let him be an openly gay congressman and live a life of honesty and integrity. So, lacking that possibility, he chose (and obviously there were other choices open to him, however painful they might have seemed then as compared to now) to seek expression in an arena where he (a) had some power and (b) was likely to be protected by the political interests of his colleagues and (c) the vulnerability of those he targeted.

Given that there’s pretty much always a imbalance of power between a kid and an adult in our culture, just the fact that Foley was a 54 year old man soliciting a 16 year old is bad enough. But the fact that he was doing this as a congressman with pages who worked in Congressional offices just ratchets the issue up even more. (Especially when you consider that a page’s work for a member of congress may be a step towards a political career of their own.)

That the Republican leadership in the House knew about Foley’s behavior for over a year (Think Progress has the timeline), and did nothing about it, just puts the icing on the cake.

Unfortunately, for the extreme right, those people who have become the twisted moral compass of the republican party, articles like Sexual fascism and the Mark Foley scandal and Pro-Homosexual Political Correctness Sowed Seeds for Foley Scandal are already polluting the political waters. Which is why Slate.com's John Dickerson's warning should be taken seriously by democrats and the people in their echo chamber:

This is about preying on a young person, not sexual orientation, say Democrats. They're right. These pages are not just young; they are employed as part of a compact. Parents send their teenagers to Washington thinking they're being looked after. One former page told me the power relationship was so skewed that she would have been thunderstruck if a member had talked to her at all. But what if the inappropriate relationship were between a congressman and a 16-year-old female page? Would GOP leaders face the same outrage for missing the warning signs? What if we were judging their actions toward a congresswoman who asked for a picture of a 16-year-old female page? For GOP leaders to pay a heavy political price requires either more evidence that they really knew what Foley was doing or for Democrats to form an alliance, at some level, with people who find homosexuality outrageous no matter what the age.

Which is why, when pondering on Foley's framing by Democrats during my recent conversations, I could not put help to think about our Jeffrey Langstraat, "The Children" is Us:

The rhetorical deployment of "The Children" has only increased since 1992. It's been an effective tool, even if it gets used in some RIDICULOUS WAYS. The Children become a reason to restrict adequate health information, contraception, sexual information, sexual devices, sexual images, vaccines...all because The Children might somewhere, somehow be exposed to it.

As a mother of two young boys, I can't even bear to theorize about them ever being the targets of criminals like Foley. I am saying this because I do not want people to think I am undermining the "we need to protect our children" frame.

I just want to point out that this frame doesn't point to a deeper problem : We living in a culture that has given license to government officials to run amok, drunk with power and high on their own abuses. This country has no system of checks and balances with which to not just hold incumbents accountable nor with which to measure candidates.

How could Foley keep up secretly with his criminal behaviour for five years, aided and abbeted by the homophobic leadership of his party all the while being in a committed gay relationship for 19 years? How could he get away with living dishonestly all the while hawking "family values" and helping pen the hateful Defense of Marriage Act?

He could do it not just because we have a corrupt government. He could get away with it because we have lost, as a culture, our social and political compass. This is not just about morality or ethics. This is about the vision of a society we as a country have created.

Capitol Hill has become a heaven for men gone wild on torture, prostitution, child abuse, illegal wiretapping, secret torture prisons thanks to our collective cynicism towards politics and government. We have a Capitol Hill filled with men gone wild, drunk with unchecked power.

The question is why? Why is this so?

How have we as a country allowed for the Mark Foleys of Capitol Hill to thrive and prosper? Jeffrey F. points to the broken moral compass :

So far the questions has been: Why did the Republican protect a sexual predator--Congressman Mark Foley--and why keep him in contact with underaged Congressional pages despite the fact that he had a history of sexual explicit internet exchanges with minors?

Those are important questions, and if the Republican Party has any sense of dignity left, the anwers to those questoins must lead to the resignation of Dennis Hastert and anyone involved in the Foley cover-up.

But as we look at the photo above, at the gleeful expression of Senator George Allen watching Mark Foley, another question emerges--perhaps a more distrubing question: Could it be that Republican Leadership was not just protecting Foley, but was actually trying to make him happy--trying to keep him happy, at least through the 2008 election?

The people of the United States have forgotten that our government is based on the idea that all men are created equal. But people like Mark Foley remind us that our culture's greed trumps any ideals of democracy or equality. On the contrary, the one with the most money wins.

If not, how do you explain the legal sucesses of people Michael Jackson, Naomi Campbell, OJ Simpson? The three of them are an example of how this plays out in all arenas of our society --regardless of race. It's not that they have the money to buy themselves out of legal troubles. They have networks of people to support them because these celebrities are their meal tickets.

So it seems was Foley to the Republicans. That is, until the page's family went public.

As a friend pointed out about the Capitol Hill internship program, you have to be incredibly well connected to get into it. That usually means that only the kids of the rich and powerful get in.

Foley was so drunk on his power-trips he obviously didn't think a 16 year-old kid could stop him.

That kid's family must be really wealthy.

His family must incredibly connected.

To media.

New media.

Maybe blogs.