October 6, 2006
Pages Again Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 AM EST Though I’m glad that he and I agree on the enduring importance of the page program, I have just a couple of responses to John Steele Gordon: 1) Mr. Gordon writes, “I feel especially sorry [for Mark Foley] because, as far as I can see, his sins here, while certainly sins, are rather small potatoes as such sins go. Consider what Rep. Gerry Studds, a Democrat, did. Studds actually had sex with a Congressional page. He was reprimanded—a slap on the wrist-by the House, then firmly in Democratic hands, not censured—a serious punishment—or expelled. He went on to win reelection several more times before he retired in 1996. So his constituents, obviously, were not horrified by the revelation.” Mr. Gordon neglects to mention that when the House reprimanded Gerry Studds in 1983, it simultaneously reprimanded Rep. Daniel Crane, a Republican from Illinois, who also slept with a 17-year-old page. In other words, the Democratic-controlled House handed out the same penalty to both Republican and Democratic offenders. Comparing 1983 and 2006 does not prove that Democrats apply a partisan double standard. It only shows that opinion has evolved over the past 23 years, and that Americans now look less kindly upon sexual (or sexually suggestive) relationships between adults and persons 17 years of age and under. I think much of this shift owes to two causes: first, a reaction against some of the excesses of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw a decriminalization or downscaling of many offenses, including those against children; and second, the extension of childhood and adolescence. With so many kids now remaining in their parents’ homes into their late teens and even into their twenties, and with so many young people remaining in college and graduate school at ages when their grandparents and parents would already have been in the work force, Americans have come to view childhood as a much more elongated category. 2) Mr. Gordon writes: “The people who are now howling for the head of the speaker for not acting swiftly to prevent a ‘predator’ from ‘stalking’ ‘children’ are the very same people who voted to revoke the charter of the Boy Scouts because that organization bans gay scoutmasters. Of course, if hypocrisy were worth a dollar a ton, Washington politicians (of both parties) could pay off the national debt in a week.” I’m somewhat confused. Does Mr. Gordon mean to suggest that gay men are a threat to young children, because they are gay? I can’t really believe that this is the point he is trying to drive home, as it is a patently offensive and ugly point to make. But his language would seem to imply just that.
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