The scandal
surrounding former Florida Republican representative Mark
Foley was critical in the Democrats’ 2006 takeover of
Congress. Now that an investigation has determined he
broke no law, was winning an election worth
perpetuating gay stereotypes?
You could be
pardoned for forgetting about mark foley. The erstwhile
congressman’s life unraveled in September 2006 with
the leaking of salacious e-mails and instant messages
he had sent to a male former congressional page, a
personally humiliating spectacle that dominated the
news for more than a month leading into the November
congressional election. Confronted with the most
embarrassing of these unseemly valentines by ABC News,
the Florida lawmaker promptly resigned, checked
himself into rehab, and released a statement through his
lawyer explaining that he was gay, an alcoholic, and
the victim of sexual abuse perpetrated by a priest
when he was a youth. Since then, the disgraced Foley
has been so reclusive it’s as if he’d vanished
off the face of the earth.
He was yanked
from his self-imposed anonymity on September 19, however,
with the news that he’s been vindicated ,-- at least
legally. After a nearly two-year investigation in
which 17 former pages were interviewed, officials with
the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced that
they had found no evidence to suggest that Foley had broken
any laws. There is nothing to suggest that he had had
sexual encounters with minors or that he had e-mailed
them explicit images. The U.S. Department of Justice
has also said it doesn’t plan to bring charges
against the former congressman.
Lest anyone
accuse me of being soft on a sexual predator, let me be
clear: What Mark Foley did was reprehensible. And the fact
that he’s been legally exonerated
doesn’t mean he should have stayed in office; he was
clearly a threat to the young charges in the page program
and needed help. But, as Florida officials discovered,
nothing he did was illegal. His untoward messages, a
few of which solicited sexual acts, were all sent to
former pages, all of whom were 16 years old or older.
The close of the
investigation against Foley once again raises questions
about the motives of the people who pushed this scandal to
such dizzying heights of notoriety. What drove them to
attack Foley with such vindictiveness? Was it really a
desire to “protect children,” as so many
of them claimed, or was there something more cynical at
work?
To this day, it
remains unclear how exactly Foley’s messages made
their way into the public eye. What is known, however,
is that for months anonymous sources peddled them to
Washington journalists in the hope of exposing Foley,
but various news organizations declined to publicize them
as there was no evidence that Foley had violated any law,
just that he was a little creepy. One of the first
journalists to receive the explicit messages was Ken
Silverstein, Washington editor of Harper’s.
His magazine refused to publish the e-mails, but after
the story broke on ABC News, he revealed that he had
received five of the salacious messages in May 2006 from a
“Democratic operative.”
Click here to follow The Advocate on Twitter.
Page 1 of 3