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Sunday, October 01, 2006

The Real Scandal is that the Scandal is About Sex Rather Than Torture

dKos Diarist Boris Godunov is exactly right when he points out that while Republican Congressman Mark Foley’s interest in a Congressional page was inappropriate and unprofessional and, since it was clearly unwanted (which is clear from the page’s complaints), also unambiguously unethical, nevertheless, it is simply inaccurate to describe it as “pedophilia.”

The 52-year-old Foley’s apparent advances on the 16-year-old certainly seem in this case to have been predatory and unacceptable -- as was the widespread Republican coverup that is now being so spectacularly and painstakingly exposed -- but unless we want to imply that the 16-year-old age of consent in Great Britain and elsewhere (the District of Columbia and Foley’s own Florida, if I’m not mistaken, both included), constitutes a legalization of pedophilia, we need to grasp that something rather hysterical is happening in the exuberant pathologization of Foley’s conduct here.

The terminally awful John Hinderaker has defended Republican House Leader Denny Hastert’s coverup of Foley’s improprieties (a defense predictably promoted by the equally terminally awful Glenn Reynolds) by struggling to link the Foley scandal to an earlier scandal involving Barney Frank.

In that sex scandal, of course, the public exposure of consensual gay sex among legal adults was “scandalous” largely because the culture in which this sex was exposed was a pathologically homophobic one. Hinderaker seems to imply that Hastert’s silence about Foley’s altogether different and predatory conduct arose from the fact that he “assumed [Foley] to be gay” and hence, naturally enough, a sexual predator. It is as if Hinderaker wants to imply that Hastert’s disinterest in sexual harassment is somehow a badge of his urbane tolerance!

As Glen Greenwald properly and pithily puts the point,
Hastert knew that Foley was gay, so it would hardly have been a surprise to Hastert to learn that Foley was harrassing underage pages. Hastert is a very busy and important man and something as unsurprising as the fact that the homosexual Foley was a sexual predator pursuing underage pages would hardly have been news to Hastert and certainly isn't anything that should have prompted his attention. A gay Congressman pursues minors, the sun comes up in the morning. That's just the way the world works. Why would Hastert take notice?

What worries me (and, to his credit, Greenwald) in all this is, of course, the pathologizing equation of queerness and predation here. This is an old, sad, and endlessly damaging homophobic fairy tale that "justifies" to this day pointless and painful barriers to lesbian and gay adoption and teaching in public schools, and has fueled who knows how many “sex panics” in which queers get routinely rounded up lest they “recruit” impressionable youth into “choosing” the “gay lifestyle” and so on.

What is so troubling is that Hinderaker’s glib exculpatory equation of queerness and predation seems to me to reappear in so many of the condemnatory responses to Foley and Hastert as well, both from the right and the left, in the constantly insistently hyperbolically reiterated testimony about how “sick” “disgusting” and “perverted” the whole business is. Whatever the response, from whatever political perspective, there seems altogether too often to be a curious vulnerability to the homophobic equation of "gayness" as such with predation, pathology, and immorality.

It should really go without saying that nothing I am saying is intended to trivialize Foley’s clearly inappropriate conduct, nor to minimize the damage the page is likely to have suffered through this whole episode. Neither do I mean to rain on the parade of Democrats who look like they have managed uncharacteristically to commandeer another proximate pre-election news cycle by foregrounding the scandal to their benefit -- and hence to the benefit of us all should this contribute to their eventual retaking of the House, the Senate, or both.

But I must admit that I am weary of the forever pathologized figure of queerness in this country, so recently offered up as the scapegoat for the defeat of John Kerry’s Presidential bid to the righteous homophobia of America's so-called “values-voters” and now returning again it seems to take the blade in the service of a possible electoral victory for the Democrats.

I have to admit that I am a bit flabbergasted to find a sex scandal megaphoned across the media landscape these last few days, when I have myself been stunned into near paralysis and utter despair by the fact that the majority of rubber-stamp Republicans (and a handful of cowardly Democrats) have facilitated the Killer-Clown Crime Family of the Bush Administration in their ongoing project to consolidate an unprecedented imperial Executive, unanswerable to any other branch of government, eager to torture citizens without warrant or recourse in the prosecution of undefinable and interminable “wars” without bounds.

In a piece in today’s Huffington Post, Cliff Schecter pivots from Foley’s misconduct to the culture of today’s “Grand Old Party” at large: “Republican Sexcapades: Meet the Real GOP.” I don’t deny that Schecter has a point, or that this sort of rhetoric is probably a winner for Democrats in general. But the fact remains that to an important extent this sort of thing is a "winner" precisely because America is a damaged intolerant and puritanical culture and that this ongoing explosion of attention and censure is likely as much an expression and exacerbation of that damage, intolerance, and awful puritanism as a rejection of it.

Frankly, I am chilled to the bone to find that America, across the spectrum from right to left, has so cheerfully embraced a sex scandal rather than (or likely as a stand-in for) spotlighting the scandal of lawlessness and torture that is in fact the bloody face of the “Real GOP” in power today.

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