Ump on a Blog

A small and seemingly uninteresting Congressional district in Florida became the focus of the nation’s attention on Friday, as the incumbent Representative, Republican Mark Foley, resigned his seat in Congress and announced his retirement. With six weeks to go before the mid-term elections, Rep. Foley’s name will have to remain on the ballot under Florida law, however the Republican Party has one week to name a candidate to whom Foley’s votes will be credited.

The reason for his resignation was a brewing scandal in which Rep. Foley engaged in e-mail and instant message exchanges with possibly as many as five current and former Congressional Pages, the contents of which are now emerging. The Pages are all male, at least one of them is under age, and the exchanges were of a suggestive nature. One Page described the contents of the Congressman’s messages as, “sick.”

The Democratic challenger in the Florida 16th, Tim Mahoney, issued a brief statement Friday expressing his concern and condolences. But you gotta believe that he’s shopping for a brownstone in Georgetown right this very minute, cigar in one hand, champagne in the other.

Mr. Foley is a six-term Congressman, 53 years old and single, and was favored to win his district again in November. Some of Mr. Foley’s colleagues in the House are now admitting that they have known about Mr. Foley’s taste for young men, and preference for Congressional employees, for at least a year. Apparently warnings were given to Mr. Foley by more than one Republican Representative during the past 12 months, and now the matter is in the hands of the House Ethics Committee. It is reasonable to think there will be an investigation, though what good it will do now that Mr. Foley is merely a private citizen is anybody’s guess.

So what’s the big deal? Why is this news? Isn’t having Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, and Michael Jackson to knock around enough?

Well, let’s see…

Former Representative Foley was co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. In fact, Foley is co-author of one of the most recent bills in the House aimed at cracking down on Internet predators. Foley has not openly declared that he is a homosexual, to his colleagues, his family, or his constituents. And finally, Foley joins a large and growing list of GOP members and supporters I like to refer to as the “Hypocrite Circus”.

Co-Chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, eh? What, was he doing, collecting phone numbers? I mean, Jeepers! That’s like finding out the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee is spying for Castro. While not a formal committee with any genuine legislative power, the Caucus is supposed to advocate on behalf of vulnerable and victimized children, and here we find out the Co-Chair is a perv. Politicians whine and moan about the degree to which the press dig into their personal lives during campaigns. This, folks, is precisely why.

Some will give me the gears over my next point, and that’s okay. Mr. Foley ran for office in a largely Republican district in (excluding the metro centers) a consistently conservative state. Not only did he not disclose his homosexuality to the voters, when alternative press articles began to circulate the rumor that he was gay in 2003, he called a press conference to decry the outlandish accusations and blame the “repulsive campaign tactic” on the state Democratic party. Additionally, Mr. Foley is on record as voting for legislation limiting protections for gays against discrimination in the workplace.

The fact that he is or may be gay would not likely influence many voters in many states, however I am confident that for most of his consitutency, it makes a world of difference. The retirees of Florida do not want a homosexual as their representative, and knowing this, Mr. Foley kept his sexual preference a secret. He won election, and five re-elections, by lying to the voters of his district. Not just about what he stands for, but about who and what he is, a far more reprehensible betrayal of trust.

There are openly gay men and women in Congress, and that’s just the point. Those individuals ran their campaigns with that fact out in the open. Mr. Foley lied about it, or more accurately did not disclose the truth about it, and now every candidate in every race this fall is going to have that question asked, and asked, and asked again. They’re going to have their family scrutinized, their friends questioned, their business associates spied on. None of this is necessary, but for the fact that somebody we trusted was found to be abusing that trust. And so with important issues to be discussed like American soldiers at war, skyrocketing energy prices, and millions of Americans unable to afford proper health care, instead every candidate in the country can expect to be asked about who they like to get busy with at least a thousand times in the next six weeks. Oh, goodie.

This is the one area of our personal life that is not visible to the naked eye or demonstrably evident through a campaign: male/female, tall/short, black/white/Latino/Asian/other, smart/dumb, eloquent/bumbler, all of these things are going to come out. Gay/straight is a matter of disclosure for the candidate, and it stands as a test of character when the truth is brought to light. Mr. Foley failed that test, and now the spotlight on every candidate’s sexual preference is going to be as intense as a laser beam for the foreseeable future. At a time when gay rights groups are finally starting to see some progress in their plight, an episode like this comes along and gives reporters permission to pry into people’s lives all the more vigorously, and gives another opportunity for the holier-than-thou bigots to hit the Sunday morning talk show circuit spreading their vitriol.

And lastly, I have little tolerance for hypocrisy. If you’re going to stick it out there, you’d better be willing to have it cut off, otherwise keep your mouth shut. Walk the walk, damnit. And here’s just another member of the Hypocrite Circus showing his true colors. Right-wing paragon and The Book of Virtues author Bill Bennett: turns out he’s blowing seven-figure sums of his royalties money at the dog track. Former Republican Senate candidate from Illinois Jack Ryan was exposed by his ex-wife as having a liking for swingers’ clubs. And the humdinger, Mr. Law and Order himself, the man who railed on for more than a decade on his syndicated radio show about locking up drug users and shipping Mexicans back across the border by the truck full, Rush Limbaugh: caught doctor-shopping to get multiple prescriptions of Vicodin, that he then sent his illegal-immigrant maid to go fill for him.

Mr. Foley now joins this elite cadre of pathetic weasels: lecturing from pulpits built on deceit, while holding themselves up as models of trust and respectability; purporting to advocate traditional Judeo-Christian values, while in their spare time they yield to temptation and commit the very sins for which they admonish us. These people go out of their way to belittle certain segments of our society: gays, addicts, immigrants, etc. Hopefully now Mr. Foley and the rest of these witless bullies will get a little taste of their own medicine. With luck, it will be sour enough to shut them up for good.