Issue Number 1018 | The Foley Follies

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The Foley Follies

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?

By James Kirchick

From The Advocate November 4, 2008

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.”

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Reader Comments

These comments are reproduced as written by visitors to this Web site. They have not been edited for content, grammar, or spelling. The viewpoints appearing here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or views of advocate.com, The Advocate, or its affiliates.

Name: Michael
Date posted: 2008-10-17 5:01 PM
Hometown: Brooklyn

Comment:

It's a bit of stretch to argue that Foley or Buse were outed because they didn't conform to a the outer's ideology. What made their sexual exploits newsworthy was their hypocrisy, even if Foley's was only flirting, and their arrogance. I can see no particular reason to protect people's closets in general. To do so is to enter into their web of lies, and if you argue that Buse wasn't in a closet, then well, what's the problem with letting people know in general, of pointing out he works for someone who would condemn him to second class citizenship. That's interesting. As for letting their crazy church supporters know, yes it's a dirty tactic. But it only works because of the idiocy of the prejudices of church nuts. I would see no problem in letting the KKK know if someone like David Duke had a Black or Jewish spokesperson who was passing. It's really a question of you reap what you sow.

Name: Anton
Date posted: 2008-10-17 3:01 PM
Hometown: Asheville

Comment:

Look Jim, no one is saying that the media was necessarily fair in covering the Foley scandal. Certainly the fact that he was gay gave the whole thing a freakshow vibe in the way coverage that might not have been the case if he was sleeping with a young woman. However, to compare people who think his hypocrisy is fair game for criticism to Nazis is just ridiculous. No one is saying gay republicans should be exterminated. Nor should Foley be prosecuted for being gay. But since he is gay and he works for a party that historically opposes LGBTQ rights, media scrutiny had a field day, and it's easy to see why. I agree that not all republicans spend their days trying to think of ways to undermine gay people, but seriously, are you trying to suggest that the Republican party is queer friendly? Did you forget the 2004 election?

Name: Jim FitzGerald
Date posted: 2008-10-16 12:53 PM
Hometown: Chicago

Comment:

What a simple solution! Republicans "consistently seek to undermine your civil rights" they "deserve what they get". How is that different from the justification given by Germans for the subjugation of the Jews? Do they ends always justify the means? Or only when Republicans (who everybody knows are evil hypocrites who spend every waking hour devising ways to deny the rights of gay people, torture small birds and bugger underage pages)? Listen to yourselves. "IF they're against us, they deserve whatever destruction we can throw at them." This isn't a political position, it's fascism. Kudos to The Advocate for printing something that disagrees with the frightening liberal dogma of "Republicans are evil" and "There is no depth to which we will refuse to sink in order to hurt those who disagree with us."

Name: Landon Bryce
Date posted: 2008-10-14 1:53 PM
Hometown: San Jose

Comment:

Yes, Jamie. Lots of us squirmed when the left adopted the right's homophobic methods with Foley. Most of us, though, recognized that Foley, an enemy of gays and of decent behavior, deserved what he got. It is an embarrassment that the Advocate would print this apologia for an adult who sexually harrassed teenagers. Abuse is not an excuse: I was molested when I was five, and I have no sympathy for victims like me who become abusers like the guy who raped me. And I have no respect for gay journalists like Jamie who excuse rightwingers their blatant attacks on us and lambast every Democrat who does anything that could be considered remotely anti-gay. The Advocate used to have better standards than this.

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