October 6, 2006
Sex Scandals, Past and Present Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Mr. Smoler brings up a long list of instances when Republicans have sought partisan advantage in the past over matters touching on sex and sexual orientation, the GOP exhibiting a fine lack of intellectual consistency in the process. I don’t quibble with a single example he gives.
But if you love truth and elemental fairness, becoming a politician of whatever place on the political spectrum is contraindicated, to use a medical term. Democrats are quite as capable of selective outrage and seeking advantage—or refuge, depending on circumstances—in hypocrisy.
Take, for instance, Bill Clinton, a moderate Democrat, who had a sexual relationship—in the Oval Office itself—with a White House employee who was half his age.
Do a simple thought experiment. Assume everything was exactly the same, with one exception: Bill Clinton was a moderate Republican, not a moderate Democrat. How many readers of this blog think that the National Organization for Women (NOW) would have had the same reaction—essentially, she’s a grown-up, it’s none of our business, let’s change the subject—under those circumstances? How many think they would have been calling for him to be hanged from a lamppost in Lafayette Square for using his power to extract sexual favors from a staff member?
There’s a reason a common definition of “statesman” is “a successful dead politician.” It’s a very ugly business, and the ugliness is evenly spread around.
Mr. Zeitz quotes me as follows: “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.”
He then writes, “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.”
I can see how one might interpret what I wrote that way, but it is not, of course, what I meant. I don’t think gay men are any more of a threat to young children than straight men. Pedophilia, as far as I know—and I don’t know much; it’s a topic that makes me turn the page as quickly as possible—is not related to sexual orientation.
What I meant was that Democrats are acting as politicians do in such cases. When they are going after the gay vote, the mere hint that gay men might be more inclined to abuse children is deeply offensive. But when they sense Republican blood in the water, suddenly Rep. Foley is tantamount to a child molester and the leadership should have known it, based on e-mails so innocuous that newspapers that had the e-mails didn’t bother to write a story based on them.
To bring up the idea of “child molestation” in these circumstances is, ineluctably, to pander to the idea that homosexuals are child molesters. If Mark Foley is guilty of molesting children, a terrible crime, harshly punished in every civilized jurisdiction in the world, then Gerry Studds and Dan Crane (to keep this bipartisan and bi-orientational) are also. They, after all, were both guilty of actually having sex with Congressional pages, not just talking about it with former (and therefore older) pages. Crane was defeated for reelection, but Studds was reelected six times.
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