Congressman Gerry Studds bedded a seventeen-year-old congressional page. Congressman Barney Frank met Stephen Gobie by paying him $80 for sex, and then subsequently let the man stay in his home--from where he ran a prostitution ring. New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey cruised highway reststops for sex and passed over the former head of the FBI to run his state's counterterrorism efforts in favor of his love interest. Congressman Mark Foley resigned in disgrace after sending lewd text messages to a sixteen-year-old congressional page. From Foley preying upon young people put in his and other Congressmen's trust to Frank fixing parking tickets for his hustler boyfriend, all of these scandals involved abuses of office. Just like Monicagate, these sex scandals involved a lot more than just sex.

What is up with male homosexual officeholders? It's hardly the case that straight politicians have been immune from sex scandal. Wilbur Mills, Gary Hart, Chuck Robb, Bill Clinton, Gary Condit, et cetera, et cetera. But the number of open homosexuals who have served in Congress you can count on your fingers. You need nearly all those fingers to identify the homosexual congressmen embroiled in some sort of tawdry, sexual escapade made public. I don't recall Steve Gunderson or Jim Kolbe ever making the tabloid sheets, but it is striking that so many of the so few gay males in public office find themselves there.

Is this because the public often learns of a politician's homosexuality after a sex scandal hits? Do men who cross societal boundaries with regard to homosexuality have less of a problem crossing societal boundaries regarding prostitution, age, and other societal taboos?

My suspicion is that even raising this second question, regardless of how one answers it, is an even greater societal taboo than the appalling behavior of Studds, McGreevey, Foley and company.

Words can not express the frustration that I, and many other gay conservatives, feel regarding the hypersexuality and perversion of our most visible representatives.

From exposed sexual organs at Pride Festivals to pedophile priests and legislators, I can see why the 98% heterosexual majority wants to pass prohibitions against us. I would too!!

I pray that members of that 98% heterosexual majority always quantify their judgments, and remember that not *all* gay men flaunt hypersexuality and perversion. Those that behave this way are a minority of gays and, unfortunately, most visible to mainstream America.

A literature review completed this month and published in 'American Psychologist' estimates (based on multiple peer-reviewed articles) that 40%-65% of gay men enter long term, committed, monogamous relationships; a number not far off from heterosexual estimates.

Congressman Foley, shame on you. I hope you see the inside of a jail cell.

I KNEW this was how the Republican strategy machine would spin this story.

Thanks for the heads up Dan.

I'm looking forward to see the Fox News "You Just Can't Trust Gay People" report tonight.

Look the Repubs have a big problem here.

The fundamet- err "values voters" out there are turned off by this scnadal.

How to mitigate the damage?

Make the story about how GAYS are ALWAYS immoral. How they will ALWAYS threaten your children. Make GAYS the threat and then question becomes:

Which party can better protect us from these gays?

Sure Foley was a Repub. But the Repubs have a solid anti-gay record.

Stick with them, and this won't happen again.

That's the new spin folks.

Its ugly.

I didnt think of it that way HEEHAW. i like it. so thanks.
YOURS TRULY
ANTI-HOMO REPUBLICAN

Not all republicans are anit-homo. But enough of the "values voter" coalition is to make gey-bashing absoulutley nessacary for any republican candidate in "values" districts.

This was the Democrats ploy. They have sat on this information for awhile now and just all of a sudden leak it right around election time. Now Foley's name must remain on the voting ballot. So guess who the voters are going to vote for in November? A disgraced unemployed Homo-pedophile or a Democrat. Me, I cant tell the difference between the two.

HeHe: I know of five gay men who have served in Congress. Doubtless, there have been many more. But I know of five. Of those five, two have got into trouble over attempts at having sex with teenage boys. Another allowed a known prostitute to live in his house and partake in his trade. Five is too small a sample group to project behaviors upon millions of gay Americans. At the same time, because these representatives are tasked with representing not only their constituents, but--whether they like it or not--representing other gay people as well, it is important that they not act in ways that perpetuate ugly stereotypes. For the most part, they have failed to do this. As Anthony points out, the vast majority of gays are NOT cruising highway reststops for sex, housing brothels, or preying upon high schoolers. Yet, the majority of high-profile gay men in major elective office are engaging in such behavior. There are some obvious victims in these cases. Some less than obvious ones are the run-of-the-mill gay guys who encounter people who immediately assume they engage in reckless behavior because the gay people that they know, i.e., the ones they see on the news (George Michael and Mark Foley are this week's examples), engage in them. I don't think it benefits homosexuals at all to play the homophobia card on this unless you want to suggest that what is being attacked--preying upon sixteen-year-old boys--is somehow a normal part of homosexuality. Then what are you accomplishing? Giving homophobia a good name.

http://www.amconmag.com/07_28_03/cover.html

Homosexuality is highly correlated with a number of social pathologies and psychological problems, even if we accept the PC decision by the APA to cease listing it as a mental condition in and of itself.

I haven't seen a study, but I'm sure if you could get congressman to honestly answer a psychologists questions, you'd find a great correlation among politicians and sociopaths, and probably a number of other psychological disorders.

Do a multiple correlation, add to the fact that females tend to be the ones who say no when it comes to sex and removing them from the equations screws things up more, A gay politician is fairly likely to have his shares of problems.

Dan:

Aside from being a small sample, that group of five people are also not representative of gay men because your list can only include openly gay men (which I suspect is less common among politicians than in the general population), or men who were outted (which most likely happened through a scandal). Beyond that, your list can only contain people you remembered, and scandals are very memorable.

That is why so many of the few known gays in office do these things. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't make these considerations when they are forming their opinion on homosexuality.

Brian: Who are the "known" gay men in Congress who I have missed? I know of Steve Gunderson and Jim Kolbe, who seemed to have led scandal-free lives, and Barney Frank, Gerry Studds, and Mark Foley, who engaged in conduct far outside of what's appropriate. The only other Congressman I can think of who could be conceivably included is Bob Baumann, who also was caught in flagrante with an underaged male. I think it's unfair to include him because, at least if my mere memory serves, he lived life as a straight man and didn't identify as a homosexual--even if he did engage in homosexual acts. Not including him is debatable, but should I have included him it would have only butressed my point (and perhaps your sub-point on closeted gays as well): gay congressmen have set a horrible, horrible example. If there were some openly gay congressmen who have led lives like Gunderson or Kolbe, and not like Studds or Foley, please provide them, Brian. If not, then maybe look at the objective facts--a disturbing proportion of the small number of gays in Congress have engaged in objectionable conduct--instead of excusing them away.

I don't see how sexual attraction to post-pubescent boys is not a facet of the homosexual male condition. It has to be doesn't it? Just as finding post-pubescent girls to be sexually desirable is a natural facet of the heterosexual impulse for men. Different societies have defined age of consent and marriage laws differently and treat sexual adulthood in different ways. The age of 18 as the age of consent law is an arbitrary limit, but necessarily so. That is, since what is being defined by society is at what "age" we can at least hope that people have become capable of mature and adult decision-making then that age is necessarily going to be arbitrary since the requisite maturity can only be determined in an individual case by case. I would frankly lean towards arguing that 18 is no longer a good age to assume maturity in this country, and should be ratcheted up to 21 or so, as the last couple of generations have really been successful in extending adolescence practically indefinitely. However, an age must be picked and 18 is at least definitely better than anything below it.

What restrains men from pursuing under-age girls (recall the joke in Swingers of "where do the high school girls hang-out?") is social pressure and the law, and in thankfully very many cases, personal virtue. But since sexual maturity occurs long before we can correctly and honestly identify a child as actually mature and an adult, it is impossible to claim that attraction to the under-age is in itself an aberration, except in so far as one has an upright character and the virtue to recognize a 16 year-old girl or boy as an improper object of sexual desire for reasons other than actual physical maturity. What I am saying is that such attraction is wrong because of the proper moral reasoning which should inform and control our passions, but in this case I think the passion itself cannot be technically called an aberration and is natural (assuming its being constrained by reason and made docile).

So . . . if that is the case, then which group, hetero or homo men, is more a threat to the seduction of adolescents? Clearly homosexual men. Visit San Francisco and this becomes abundantly clear by the numerous couplings of the very middle-aged and very boyish seen everywhere. This is clearly the case as evidenced by the scandals of homosexual seduction that has buffeted the Catholic Church in America. This is clearly the case given the psychological strength and pressure that homosexual desire exudes on those who suffer from it compared to the more manageable, because natural, pressure that sexual desire exudes on a heterosexual male's psyche.

Homosexuality is a tragic pathological condition. The sooner individuals afflicted by it realize it the sooner they can break that curse just as manic depressives, and alcoholics have to confront their self-destructive tendencies honestly. Giving homosexuals positions of stewardship over children is like giving bartending licenses to known alcoholics, or pharmacy jobs to manic depressives, it is an irresponsible act destructive both to the homosexual and the children. The only ones served by it are those whose vanity is soothed by the moral preening of being taken by the morally liberal or fashinable as "tolerant."

Dan, al I'm saying is that Mark Foley did what he did cuz he was screwed in the head, not cuz he was gay.

You say he represents Gay America, but he represents a lot of other things as well. His a Floridian. A Lithuanian. An orthodox christian. A man. And a polititian.

Why is it his gayness that lead him to be a creep?

As far as we know, lithuanians, orthodox (I thought he was catholic, maybe not) christians, at least those who are in congress, do not have tawdry sexual habbits that come to light.

If there were only 5 lithuanians in congress and 3 had been involved in sex scandals, then I'm sure dan would pose the same question.

To build on Bruce Wayne's point, The modern conception of a "gay man" has only been around for about 150 years. While there has been homosexuality since the beginning of time, in virtually all recorded cases until victorian times it occurred either

a) in places where there were no women and men just got so horny they'd go low like in Prison, army, or pirates or
b) it was among older men and young boys like with the Ancient greeks or the Japanese.

Half of pedophiles are gay, and yet gays only make up 4 percent of the population, so clearly there is something to it.

“It’s one of the worst Congressional scandals ever,” Cliff Kincaid

Hear that.

CLIFF KINCAID!!

yep.

Newt parodied the gay line on fox news today.

Wow.

Are you serious?

The House leadership left a pedephile in office cuz they were too afraid of being called "gay bashers".

Please.

PIT-A-FUL!

Dan:

In that statement, my main point wasn't that there are more known gay men that you missed. I was saying that a group composed only of open and outed gays is not representative of all gays because it excludes closeted gays that don't get into scandalous affairs involving subordinates or minors. Also, I have reason to believe that openly homosexual people are underrepresented in Congress. If you split up homosexual congressmen into subgroups (open, evasive, outed by others, etc), you might be able to get reasonable conclusions about those subgroups within the general gay population. But the relative proportions of those subgroups within congress is suspect.

But since you asked about gay men in congress, I did a little research. I started from Wikipedia lists of gay politicians and LGBT politicians from the United States. I compiled a list of the current and former male members of the US Congress, who were either openly gay or were at least accused of sexual relationships with other males.

* Barney Frank (D): openly gay since 1987, gay rights advocate. In 1985, he hired Steve Gobie to work at his house. In 1990, he learned that Gobie was running a prostitution ring. He fired Gobie and was later reprimanded for using his position to fix 33 parking tickets for Gobie and sending a "false memo." (I need more research on this). Barney Frank rule: "outing is only acceptable when a person uses their power or notoriety to hurt gay people."
* Gerry Studds (D): openly gay, gay rights advocate, had a sexual relationship with 17 year old congressional page in 1973. He has been with his current partner since 1991 and married him in Boston on May 24, 2005, a week after the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts. He advocated gay marriage, AIDS funding, and gay rights in general.

* Robert Bauman (R): devout Catholic, married, four children, he denounced homosexual behavior, and was later arrested for trying to solicit sex from a 16-year-old male. Became an alcoholic over the stress of his double life. He had his marriage annulled and came out as openly gay (ending his double life), then he overcame his alcoholism. He's remained close to his children.
* David Dreier (R): outed, and remains evasive. Had a "romantic relationship" with his chief of staff, who collected a record salary for a chief of staff. Supports DOMA, opposes gay adoption, and won't include homosexuals in hate crime and employment discrimination laws.
* Mark Foley (R): evasive. Advocate of strengthening child pornography laws. Wanted to ban the "display of a minor (through any medium) without a direct or indirect purpose of marketing a product or service other than the minor." Passed a law to give youth organizations (like the Boy Scouts) access to FBI fingerprint background checks. Supports legal abortion, but advocates adoption and abstinence as better alternatives. Had sexually explicit online communication with a 16-year-old congressional page. Now vulnerable to prosecution under some of his own laws.
* Steve Gunderson (R): openly gay, and a gay rights advocate. Only Republican in Congress to vote against DOMA. Now out of congress, he continues to advocate gay rights causes.
* Jon Hinson (R): Admitted he was arrested for exposing himself to an undercover police man, denied that he was gay, and blamed alcoholism for his behavior. Later arrested for performing oral sex on a male Library of Congress employee in the restroom of the House of Representatives. He resigned from Congress, acknowledged his homosexuality, got divorced, and became and advocate for homosexual causes. Fought to end the ban on gays in the military, and founded the Fairfax Lesbian and Gay Citizens Association. He wrote that when he was first elected, he was "still closeted and into heavy denial." He died of an AIDS-related complication in 1995.
* Jim Kolbe (R): openly gay (came out on his own after a threat of outing over DOMA), no scandals. Supports DOMA + civil unions.
* Michael Huffington (R): openly gay and a Log Cabin Republican.

Nearly everyone has a personal morality. Any action which violates that belief system is considered wrong and is reason to feel shame and guilt. Often, even thoughts about the action cause feelings of guilt. People that can't control their actions or thoughts frequently overcompensate by speaking out against or trying to stop the "evils." They are simply more capable of the "activism" than they are of changing who they are, so they do what they can to relieve the guilt. Essentially, they started out with an internal struggle, then they externalized it. Robert Bauman, David Dreier, Mark Foley, and Jon Hinson fit this pattern. Jon Hinson managed to resolve his issue.

Thanks for the list. Huffington was married, and not openly gay, during his one term in Congress. People have said Drier is gay, and maybe he is, but it has not been established. I was not aware of Jon Hinson.

I understand the claim you are making with the sometime shady lives of closeted people. But what are you to make of Foley, Studds, and Frank? Frank announced he was a homosexual prior to the Gobie scandal. Studds never made such an announcement--that wasn't really the thing to do 25 years ago--but he made no secret of his life as a gay man. I, and I assume everyone who follows politics closely, have known that Mark Foley is gay. In other words, these men weren't hiding anything, yet they still engaged in shady activity. Gunderson and Kolbe were hiding something, yet there are no reports of shady activity that I know of.

Word around Washington has been for quite some time that Lindsey Graham likes the fellas.

But its only whispered rumors.

I can believe that about LG.

Anthony's remarks seem most sensible here. Judge people on their own merits. Politicians generally get more scrutiny than the rest of us, so we should expect them to be tripped up in scandals more than the rest of us. I admit to having a prejudice that pols are inordinately self-centered a$$es with delusions of godhood. Foley's Follies are no reason to change how you vote unless you are in Foley's district. The Repubs did no different than the Dems would do, so look at policy rather than crap.

Webster, I totally agree. Up to a point.

Foley didn't do it cuz he was gay. He did it cuz he was a pol, and pols are powerful and all power is abused.

Blame Foley for the pedephia and Foley alone.

But this scandal has evolved. It is the responsibility of the House Leadership to protect House Pages from abuse. House leaders KNEW this was going on, and they let it continue because they didn't want to take an election hit.

Well that backfired.

The questoion now isn't just that what Foley did was wrong, its a decision making process so cynical, so partisan, so calulating that the House REPUBLICAN Leadership (no Democrats were told of this) made the decision to allow Foley to continue abusing.

With leadership like that, the Repubs deserve to loose.

I think they'd have a better change if they all came back to Washington, threw out Hastert and Bohener and start anew with Speaker David Drier and Majority Leader Chris Shays.

With leadership like that, the Repubs deserve to loose.

Republicans and Democrats alike. They've all got it comin', paraphrasing William Munny.

Hehe a game of scandal scorecard between the two parties over the past 10 years would result in a 2 to 1 loss in favor of more scandalous behavior for the dems. For you to think otherwise would be foolish.

Gene, actually you are wrong.

Most of the Clinton scandals were foolish stories dug by by Scaife.

Republicans have been hit with REAL ethics scandals.

Delay INDICTED. RESIGNED.

Gingrich RESIGNED.

Libby. INDICTED.

Cunningham. CONVICTED.

Ney. PLEA DEAL.

Abrahmoff. PLEA DEAL.

What do you have on your side?

Travelgate? Please.

Will we be adding Kolbe to the list soon?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/08/AR2006100800855.html