Foley's Follies: Sexual Deviance in DC

The latest sex scandal to hit US politics is a minuscule peek into a horrid reality in Washington DC today: rampant predation and liverspotted lawlessness. And we’re not talking consensual cigar sex between two portly adults: the corridors of power are hotbeds of sexual deviance the likes of which even the late Kennedy brothers would have cringed at. How do we know? Because some of the nastiness leaks its way into the press, bit by bit, mulling in the background until just around election time, when it blows like a geiser of moral trepidation and electoral swing.

Foley's Follies

Mark Foley, a 6-term Republican Congressman for Florida and, more disturbingly, a former Chairman of the House of Representatives Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children has been outed as a paedophile (notice how the BBC intentionally omits the word "sex" from the headline of this story and the leading paragraph, even though this is clearly a scandal about sex, not emails) who made sexual advances and solicited sexual intimacy from his pageboys – high school students as young as 15 years old who work as messengers and office assistants for Congress members. Transcripts of emails and AOL instant messages he exchanged with these boys have been published and broadcast in the US press this week, prompting his resignation and, more importantly, a dip in the polls for Republicans.

Still, it remains to be seen whether this scandal will be sufficient -- in addition to the 2 major wars the present Republican "leader"ship is fighting (and the one in Iran they've been planning for years) at the cost of American livs and dollars, the radically invasive domestic privacy and civil rights laws they've passed, the economic destruction they've commnitted, and the total lack of disregard for the American people they've demonstrated -- to convince the American public to vote them out of a majority in Congress.

Bushler has denounced Foley’s behavior as “digusting” but the Republican party is scrambling to slap the scandal off the frontpages now that election time is just a month away. And now it seems a lot of “leaders” – including House Speaker Dennis Haestert – knew about Foley’s deviance but hadn’t done anything about it. That, too, is a crime of child endangerment and would be prosecuted if there were a reliable and decent justice system for human rights in this world: to have knowledge of an individual who is a danger to children and to not report it essentially leaves the door open for more children to be victimized.

Foley, for his part, has today attempted to offer an explanation for his criminal behavior: he has not only announced that he is gay (any pageboy could’ve told us that) but that he was molested by a clergyman when he was between the ages of 13 and 15. Yes, Foley is trying to justify himself by proving that he intended (or possibly did – we still don’t know the full details of this story) to destroy other boys’ lives exactly as someone had destroyed his. Uh-huh. Either he’s indicating that being molested didn’t bother him so it shouldn’t bother other children, or he’s proving that he is in fact sadistic and sociopathic and does not care that he is hurting innocent children. If that’s not criminal, then I don’t know what is.

David Hager's Sexual Deviance

The most questionable aspect of all of this is not that sexual deviants like Foley exist (and are no doubt rampant) in Washington but that more of them are not being exposed for the criminals they are. We know American journalists, with a few rare exceptions, are wont to actually engage in investigative reporting (and when they do, they sign a deal with PBS to “reveal” to the American public what everybody else in the world already knows), but they are masters of paparazzi-style dirt and dish journalism, so something’s not adding up if a town full of lascivious “leaders” keeps getting away with criminal sexual offenses.

The only other sexual deviant they’ve exposed in recent memory was one year ago – and it was not even reported in the mainstream press. Long before Foley’s follies came to light (and according to the latest updated reports, the movers and snakers in DC knew about Foley’s predilection for pubescent pageboys as early as 1995), another disgusting DC dilettante was not only soliciting salacious services, but committing them. Last year, the Nation magazine (see previous comment about PBS journalism) was the only significant US publication to report on another one of DC’s upstanding figureheads whose private life is a total dismissal of his public pronouncements of morality. W. David Hager, an obstetrician and gynecologist who was the Bushler administration's appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration, is, according to his ex-wife of 32 years and her confidantes, a sodomizer, and a wife rapist.

It turns out that for years he would anally-rape his wife as she was asleep suffering from narcolepsy. He was so obsessed with sodomy that at times he would pay his wife so she'd allow him to sodomize her when she was conscious (and she was so dependent and self-respectless that for many years she accepted his money.) But – and notice the similarity here between US religious fundamentalism and say, Iranian religious fundamentalism or any religious fundamentalism – very few people are taking this woman’s word for it: Hager has brashly dismissed her claims as vindictive and insane and, as in most cases of rape, the victim has become the accused.

Religion and Sex

And what, as always, does this all return to? The institution of religion. Most of the world seeks solace, redemption, and hope in the institutions of religion – that, or a power structure based on faith and moral authority with which to justify themselves and their actions to everybody else. Hager was an evangelist who peppered his speeches, his writings and his legal directives with Christian ideology and righteousness. Foley was a churchgoer and homosexual who joined a church where paedophilia is rampant and a political party that condemned his sexuality. Both were victims of an institution that denounces and controls sexuality to such an extent that its most fanatic adherents desperately hunger for and turn to deviance in order to meet their natural sexual inclinations.

The Saccharinist has said it before and will say it again: religious institutions are political institutions -- nothing more or less than organs of power. Mix the two together and you have a recipe for criminally insane inhumanity.