The shamelessness of Mark Foley

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm outraged that Mark Foley is trying to play the gay card right now.

Foley, who until last week was a congressional representative from Florida, two days ago said through his lawyer that he is gay. The timing of this announcement is questionable, to say the least.

After all, didn't he resign under a cloud of scandal for sending inappropriate e-mail to congressional pages? What's the message he's trying to send here, "Don't blame me for chasing underage males; I couldn't help it, I'm gay"? If he had sent explicit messages to female pages, would he have asked his attorney to announce that he's heterosexual? Good grief.

The issue isn't that he's gay. The issue is that he allegedly was sending explicit e-mail to male pages. That's it. Trying to give this the "I'm a victim, feel sorry for me" spin is shameful, and it should be offensive to every other gay man and woman in this country, since he's essentially saying that being gay made him sexually predatory.

It seems in some ways like Foley's trying to follow the lead of former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevy, who managed to turn his resignation two years ago into "I had to resign because I'm gay" rather than "I had to resign because I used my position as New Jersey governor to grant my lover a Cabinet-level position he wasn't qualified for."

I know from the misery that some of my friends have gone through that being closeted is hell, and that being open about a gay sexual orientation often isn't much better, and I'm sure that having to live in the closet -- particularly for a public figure -- is unimaginably worse. But let's not use sexual orientation as an excuse for criminal behavior. That's just an insult.

Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


(Whaddya know: The Palm Beach Post agrees with me.)

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