Mark Foley

Image courtesy of Jossip

I was invited to attend the Reuters' Newmaker Event : Public figures, Private Lives.

The focus was actually on celebrities, paparazzi and the rise new media upstarts like Perez Hilton, Jossrip or the indy image agency Splash News. You all know who Perez and Jossip are. SplashNews, though, is the little company that could --they were the ones who snagged the rights to the "drunken stepfather" photographs of Mel Gibson; the ones taken minutes before his DWI arrest and anti-semitic ranting.

David has an excellent recap over at Jossip. He tells of how Bonnie Fuller polygraphs sources on some of their scoops. Crazy! Given that she is the biggest purveyor of gossip-as-cracktainment, this bit of news proves Bonnie Fuller is the Donna of the biggest gossip mafia in the world.

That's so hot!

This being Reuters though, the conversation when from gossip to politics thanks to Mark Foley. And of course, it was used as a moment to bitch-slap "the blogs".

Sigh.

A year ago I debated with Paul Holmes, the chief editor of Reuters global news division, about myths rurrounding blogs. A year has passed, much has happened since, and he's totally hit to blogging. But somehow these panels end up into blogsmears and now the shift is from "bloggers are rookies nobody should pay attention to" to "if Democrats/Lamont/candidate-of-your-choice looses, it will show how "the blogs" can't be trusted".

Mark Foley, Republican Congressman, solicits sex from a minor. And the Republican leadership did nothing. And now we find they are lying through their teeth about it.

Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert and Tom Reynolds all claimed they had known nothing about Foley's sleaze. They were innocent as could be. Then we learn from one of Reynold's aides that Reynolds had known months before they had admitted they had known, months before the news broke. They knew for months and did nothing to report Foley's illegal and immoral behavior.

Now we learn the lies and cover-ups are even worse than we thought. We now learn that Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., confronted Foley about his Internet communications with teenagers as early as 2000. That means Foley has been a sitting Republican Congressman for SIX YEARS after the Republican party KNEW he was soliciting sex from minors. From Salon.com:

October 09,2006 | WASHINGTON -- A Republican member of Congress confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his Internet communications with teenagers as early as 2000, according to a newspaper report.

The report in the Washington Post pushes back by at least five years the date when a member of Congress acknowledges learning of the Florida Republican's questionable behavior toward pages.

It came as the Republican leadership attempted to present a united front on the congressional page scandal that has rocked the GOP a month before midterm elections and put House Speaker Dennis Hastert on shaky ground.

The Republicans are spinning things so fast about the Foely sleaze scandal that it's a wonder they don't fall down from dizziness. Republican Congressman Foley solicited sex from a minor...period. And the Republican leadership knew about it well before the story broke and they did nothing except try to cover it up. THAT is the scandal.

All the Republican posturing about gays and liberals is all just a smoke screen to try and hide the clear fact that the Republicans ALLOWED A SEXUAL PREDATOR TO REMAIN IN CONGRESS.

But the Republicans want to blame the gays. This is the response from the Human Rights Campaign:

Congressman Mark Foley’s sexually-charged communications with young congressional pages was reprehensible and we have strongly condemned it. We have also been equally quick to condemn some in the GOP for their attempts to blame this scandal on the GLBT community.

Just hours ago, following Speaker Hastert's press conference, I sent a letter to him expressing outrage at the efforts of some in his party to scapegoat gay people for this unfortunate situation. You can read the full letter here.

At the beginning of the week, I issued the following statement to the press:

“Gay or straight, Democrat or Republican, it is completely inexcusable for an adult to have this kind of communication with a minor. Congressman Foley brought shame on himself and this Congress by his horrible behavior and complete lack of judgment. We strongly condemn his behavior.”

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.