October 4, 2006
Congressional Pages II Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:30 PM EST Two days ago Josh Zeitz posted an entry on this site recounting his rewarding experience as a congressional page and saying that he hoped representatives wouldn’t use the occasion of the Foley scandal to do away with congressional pages entirely. On the same day, Representative Ray LaHood called for an end to the practice of having young people serve as congressional pages. The country does not want to put boys and girls in harm’s way. Or to put it another way, the men and women who govern the country cannot trust themselves to resist temptation.
The practice of blaming the victim has a long and dispiriting history. As a girl, reading some novel in which religion played a role—it might have been To Kill a Mockingbird or Strange Fruit—I was shocked to come across a sermon warning of the evils into which women will lead good men. I had never thought of myself as an occasion for sin. Most religions buy into this stereotype of women as distracting, dangerous, and therefore responsible for men’s delinquency. The law has followed suit. Though occasionally the men who frequent prostitutes are swept up in raids, it is the women and girls who made the men do it who serve time. And the tradition of the she-was-asking-for-it defense in rape cases has become less common but not extinct. In fact a few years ago I was surprised to learn that as a middle-class woman of a certain age, I would not be welcomed on a jury by a prosecuting attorney in a date rape case, because my assumptions would be that the girl, if not asking for it, should not have put herself in a situation that permitted the rape. I guess those early books got to me after all.
The cry to abolish the congressional page system seems to be building. Since the foxes who were guarding the chicken coup failed to prevent one of their own from making a raid, their solution now is to burn down the chicken coup.
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