Everything is the Democrats' fault. Don't you all know that? We've heard it often enough around here from our right-wing friends. In this case, we are clearly looking at the results of decades of leftist attacks on family values. I mean, the right warned us back in the '90s that Clinton's example would corrupt others, and sure enough, it's corrupted this poor, beleaguered Congressperson. There simply were no cases in history of grown men lusting after 16-year-old boys until the '60s made it all happen.

You've got to hand it to the left. It would have been so easy for them to slip up and turn some Democrat into a pedophile -- I mean, they're all moral cretins to begin with, right? But in their insidious brilliance, they instead practiced their black arts on a Florida Republican, forcing his resignation just weeks before a closely contested election. It's no wonder the left, from its elite perches along the coasts, manages to control everything, from high gas prices, to the media filth pouring forth from giant telecommunications companies, to the war we're losing in Iraq. It's a good thing we've got the greatest president in history still standing on the bridge, holding back the shaggy hoards and all those evildoers who hate our freedoms.

...but you do make me a little nauseous.

How do you spell "Republican?"

H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y.

I love the smell of schedenfreude in the afternoon, a waft of flaming fascist here, a drift of crumbling cracker there. Thanks for the freebies, GOP, and may you rot in hell, individually and collectively.

...if you hear me shouting with unrestrained glee from the housetops. Schadenfreude is just too tame a term for what I'm feeling right now.

As a gay man who is not now and has never been the least bit interested in little boys, I and the rest of the male homosexuals in this country have long been tarred with the double brush of being not only sick and disgusting for having sex with other men, but with the implication that we're predators of underage boys as well. The vast majority of pedophiles are heterosexually predatory, but that hasn't stopped the religious right and its spokesmen in the political world from striving to keep homosexuals from being teachers, scout leaders, and any other profession that might bring them into contact with young boys. This has been done with the often explicit accusation that to be gay somehow makes one a pedophile automatically, which is not one whit truer about us than it is about heterosexual men.

Now a noted champion of child protection, a man whose bitter contempt for pedophiles has never been tempered by even a smidgen of human compassion or understanding, has been uncovered as (gasp!) a pedophile himself. And I just hafta say - I LOVE IT!

I don't condone pedophilia. I agree that children must be protected from those (like Foley) who would prey upon them. But it's wrong, wrong, wrong to demonize pedophiles the way Foley has, the way nearly the whole of society does. It's high time that we acknowledged that pedophilia is a natural state of being, folks. We're biological creatures, and we reach sexual maturity far earlier than we reach full maturity in our modern society. Men who desire sexual contact with underage children aren't sick; they're holdovers. They're in the grip of an instinct left over from a time when our sophisticated social norms didn't hold. They're not evil; they're just damned unlucky.

So should we just let them act on their instincts? Of course not. Our ability to transcend our instincts and give priority to the dictates of mind over body when we're deciding how to behave is what separates us from the animals. Pedophiliac desires may be biologically based and hardwired by nature into a segment of our population, but we have a responsibility to resist those impulses. All should, and many do. Those who can't or won't have to be controlled. But to shower them with hate and fury as Foley has done is just wrong. Lock them up, sure, but do it with compassion and pity, because these people are trapped by their desires in a hell they can't escape from, no matter how hard they try.

Just ask Mark Foley. Having been one of the foremost haters, he's now one of the foremost hated. And while I'm shouting gleefully today, tomorrow I'll be feeling sorry for another poor soul who just couldn't master his nature.

Like so many high-profile "family values" Republicans, Rep. Foley was better at announcing what a good Christian he was than he was at actually living like one.

Every time you think these fascist bastards can't lower the bar any further, they dig a deeper trench with a deeper stench and lower away. Smells like republikan demise in November. Watch out, Iran; nothin' like a fresh invasion. Or, we could just go Code Red for the whole month of Oktoberfest, with a chance of widely scattered Moslems.

This makes my day. Another perverse agent of repression has bit the dust!

And luckily this sicko seems to have been caught before the act (although his swift admission of guilt and the ominoius suggestion that there are other emails out there lead me to believe that he's perhaps done worse already).

What is it with these guys?? Remember Brian Doyle from Homeland Secutity? As someone on another message board said "Dirty officials are security risks because they are susceptible to blackmail." Right, so even the right-wing constituents of this corrupt 12-year congressman will now drop him like a hot turd!

Thank god for the truth! It feels like the light of day is finally piercing through the crumbing wall of Republican corruption. Maybe some of our rural brothers and sisters will start to realize that these rich fatcat powermongers aint on their side after all.

The last link in Grieve's post is to a St. Petersburg Times article from 2003, which falsely states:

"Frank, who steered clear of addressing the question of Foley's sexuality, is one of three openly gay members of Congress (along with U.S. Reps. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz). All acknowledged their homosexuality after winning congressional seats and have been re-elected. No openly gay nonincumbent has successfully run for Congress."

That's not true, because Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin was an out lesbian before running for the US Congress for the first time in 1998. She is now completing her fourth term. So out gays are not unelectable, though maybe gay Florida Republicans are unelectable.

But this is not really relevant to Mark Foley, as apparently he wasn't a normal gay person with a nice (adult!) partner like Tammy Baldwin is. He was in fact a creepy pedophile. Creepy pedophile Florida Republicans? Completely unelectable.