WASHINGTON, 23 October 2006 — Here in Washington, we’re all competing to see who can be more po-faced about Mark Foley and the congressional pages. Who can deplore Foley’s behavior the most? Democrats, sensing a wounded Republican Party, are going in for the kill. It’s the final evidence that the GOP is terminally corrupt: A congressman was cyber-molesting teenage boys and his party leaders evidently didn’t care.
Republicans answer: Hey, we invented child molesting! As an issue, that is. We own family values and we’re not about to let the party of Monica Lewinski and Heather Has Two Mommies outflank us on sexual morality.
Then gay voices remind people that being gay and molesting children are two different things, which of course they are. But to make the point clear, gays want everyone to know that they defer to no one in their distaste for Foley’s behavior.
So everyone claims to be terribly distressed. We glare at each other, looking as grim as possible, and the first one to break into a grin or a smirk or a snort loses. Stop it! It’s not funny! But then who are all the people watching Letterman and Leno, Steward and Colbert, and laughing — laughing! — at Foley’s shenanigans? Who are the people cracking jokes on the Internet?
Perhaps it would be a better world if everybody were as disgusted by the Foley episode as almost everybody claims to be. But the truth is that most people can’t get enough of it. Poor Dennis Hastert, the speaker, is suspected, probably falsely, of being willing to sacrifice a child for the good of his party, and now the other party reaps the benefit.
Then there is Democratic Congressman Gerry Studds (who, by a weird coincidence, died suddenly last week). In 1983, he was censured for having an actual, physical affair with a congressional page 10 years before that. He continued to serve in Congress until 1997. Compare and contrast Mark Foley: It develops that he may have had physical something-or-other with a page after all. But even before this came out, he had resigned under pressure on the basis of those e-mails alone. Doesn’t that prove that Republicans are more serious about Protecting Our Children than Democrats are? Don’t they win the pro-face contest?
Do the Republicans have a point? Maybe, but there are a few points in mitigation. One is the huge random element in what becomes a Washington scandal. You don’t need ideological conspiracies or cultural tectonic shifts. It depends on how close we are to an election, on what else is in the news, on what Michael Isikoff had for lunch, and so on.
The Studds case came paired with that of Republican Congressman Dan Crane, who had an affair with a female page. In a mutual disarmament agreement, both miscreants were “censured”. Hastert says that if Foley hadn’t resigned immediately, he would have been bounced. Maybe.
But Crane, like Studds, was renominated by his party in the 1984 election. That would be the Republican Party. (Unlike Studds, Crane lost.)
In 1983, Studds took the position that the page had been over the age of consent in the District of Columbia, which is 16, and consent for the affair had, in fact, been mutual. This, of course, left out the question whether, as a congressman, he had some special duty to protect even 17-year-old congressional pages from middle-aged men like himself. He probably did, though he never paraded as a protector of children, as Foley did.
A final difference between Studds and Foley is that the Foley case exposed the tawdry mechanics of a congressman trolling for action among teenage pages. No doubt the Studds affair involved the pre- e-mail equivalent of these mechanics, but they never became public.
Obviously, that doesn’t excuse Studds. But it also does not establish anything superior about Republican moral values.
