Foley is Fou

The FAGAT Guide:

This is bad news.

Former Congressman Mark Foley, who basically threw a hand grenade into the campaign heart of the Republican National Committee when all of this disgusting emails and IMs were revealed, has screwed the gays even as he finally admits that he is one.

Foley said yesterday, through his lawyer, that he was molested as a child by a priest, and that this may have contributed to the impulses that led him to become a sexual predator himself. This has become a re-play of what happened with Jim McGreevey. When the former governor of New Jersey held his “Gay American” speech, “Regular Americans” learned that gays are a) liars, b) corrupt and c) sexually aggressive against unwilling partners.

Now, Foley, by conceding that he is gay at the same time as revealing this childhood abuse, has taught to the same “Regular Americans” that gays are a) liars, b) sexual predators, c) twisted into their current, sick form by childhood sexual abuse.

Foley’s lawyer did say that Foley "does not blame the trauma he sustained as a young adolescent for his totally inappropriate e-mails and IMs [instant messages]. He continues to offer no excuse whatsoever for his conduct." But will anyone hear that? By announcing these messages at the same time, he’s making a pretty easy connect-the-dots picture for bigoted Americans who only want to hear that gay people are sick, or abnormal.

This amplifies a point made yesterday by Fishwatch. It doesn’t help that he’s in “rehab” and trying to combat a mysterious bout of alcoholism that none of his friends or cohorts ever noticed before. The amount of times that “treatment,” “recovery,” and “getting better” are used in the rhetoric of the scandal just add another link. “There’s something wrong with gay people,” Fox News viewers will hear. “They need to be fixed.”

The concept that a close-minded society is the cause of scandalous aberrations like Jim McGreevey and Mark Foley, rather than their innate homosexuality, is just too complicated to expect gay rights foes to grasp. Many of these people are the ones who think the world was created in seven days, remember. They like to keep it simple.

However, the most important question, we think, is this: can we get a picture of the fucking page, please? Come on bloggers, you have no journalistic integrity. Screw the kid’s right to privacy. With all this dirty talk, we need a visual!