Foley Quits Amid Allegations of Email Sex Scandal

Some Say They Felt Uneasy About Representative's Attention
Some Say They Felt Uneasy About Representative's Attention
By James V. Grimaldi, Juliet Eilperin and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 4, 2006; A01

In 1995, male House pages were warned to steer clear of a freshman Republican from Florida, who was already learning the names of the teenagers, dashing off notes, letters and e-mails to them, and asking them to join him for ice cream, according to a former page.

Mark Beck-Heyman, now a graduate student in clinical psychology at George Washington University, and more than a dozen other former House pages said in interviews and via e-mail that Rep. Mark Foley was known to be extraordinarily friendly in a way that made some of them uncomfortable.

Beck-Heyman, who was a Republican page and is now a Democrat, said the attention was "weird," and he provided a handwritten letter that Foley sent him after the page left Washington to return home to California. The note suggested that they get together during the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996.

The e-mail exchanges that have become public in recent days are between Foley and male former pages. None of those interviewed said they had received a sexual or suggestive overture from him during their time on Capitol Hill. Yet many of them said they were uneasy about Foley's actions and felt awkward complaining to anyone about them.

"Mark Foley knew that he could get away with this type of behavior with male pages because he was a congressman," said Beck-Heyman, who later worked in the Clinton White House and on Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign. "But many people on Capitol Hill," including many Republican staffers, "have known for over 11 years about what was going on and chose to do nothing," he said.

The six-term lawmaker resigned Friday after ABC News questioned him about sexually explicit electronic messages he had sent to a former page.

Yesterday, his attorney said Foley has never had sexual contact with a minor.

Also yesterday, ABC reported that Foley had a sexual conversation via instant message with a former page during a House vote in 2003.

Foley was popular with many of the pages. The teenagers come from all over the nation to serve at the Capitol, taking school classes and living in dormitories.

Their schedules are tightly controlled. They travel with adult chaperones and their computers are monitored. They attend social functions and sometimes spend time alone with House members. So when they do receive extra one-on-one attention, it is a big deal.

The pages did, however, receive a lot of attention from Foley. He attended one of their parties in a tuxedo. He donated to the fundraiser that helps pay for their prom and spoke admiringly about them in floor speeches. He learned their names and asked them about themselves. For many, it was welcome attention.

"He was consistently kind," said Bryce Chitwood, president of the 2002 page class. "He was just a very friendly man and was always willing to befriend a page. It was something we appreciated. You find yourself very low on the totem pole of the congressional power scale. For a congressman to act like he was interested in a person and cared about us was something pretty special and pretty important."

Foley spoke about his attachment to the program occasionally as part of the farewell address lawmakers delivered to House pages each summer. In 2002, he discussed how he was tempted "to put some money" in a card he gave to one page who had sent him a graduation notice.

"Then I realized he would tell all of you, and then I would get hundreds of graduation announcements," Foley said, according to the Congressional Record. "So I chose not to."

Another page had won a lunch with the congressman that year at the annual page auction. When he asked to go to Morton's steakhouse, Foley said on the House floor that the two of them "proceeded to cruise down in my BMW to Morton's. And all of this story is meant to make you all feel jealous that you were not the high bidders."

In a separate floor speech two years later, Foley praised the teenagers for their maturity. "Now, I know you have one more year of high school to conclude and that probably is some degree of relief or maybe, to those you feel like you are probably well equipped to enter your first year of college," he said. "Some of you, I think, in conversing with you, some are actually mature enough to enter college right away."

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who served as a Senate page between 1963 and 1967, said Foley's attempts to socialize with pages went beyond the ordinary. Davis and other lawmakers may have taken their own pages to lunch at the Members' Dining Room at the end of the year, Davis said, but anything else was considered inappropriate.

As a page, Davis recalled, "if a member of Congress, a House member or a senator, took the time to talk to you, that was a big deal."

Anna Fry, a former House page who said she had never heard about Foley's advances, said some of her classmates may have been tempted to correspond with the congressman after they left because they were eager to land jobs on Capitol Hill.

"After we graduated, everyone wanted to come back. Everyone was looking for an opportunity to stay in Washington," Fry said. "I can see how a 16-year-old would be vulnerable to that."

Matt Schmitz, a former page whose younger brother also was a page, said: "I certainly warned my little brother, who was a page last year. A few of the members are a little friendlier to the pages."

Beck-Heyman, who contacted The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, joined the page program in the summer of 1995. He said a departing page told him to be "very careful" of Foley. Within weeks, Beck-Heyman said, Foley had learned his name and asked at least once to take him to get ice cream. He declined. After one all-night work session, Beck-Heyman's girlfriend -- another page -- offered to bring him breakfast. Foley asked if she was his girlfriend. "It was an odd conversation," Beck-Heyman said.

After he completed the page program, Beck-Heyman wrote thank-you notes to 10 House members. He received a reply from Foley almost immediately, suggesting that the two meet up during the Republican convention in San Diego.
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Staff researcher Madonna Lebling and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

The closeted gay guy is always the one popular with the kids. Always.

Congressmen preying on teenage pages is a clear example of someone exploiting an unequal power relationship. In recent years, under Karl Rove, Republicans have been using "moral values" as an election strategy. This important part of Republican strategy has been ruined by the Foley scandal.

Page scandal proves partisan politics trump child safety
Commentary: House page scandal proves partisan politics trump child safety
By Steven Thomma
McClatchy Newspapers
10/3/06

WASHINGTON - The sad lesson of the House page scandal is that EVERYTHING in Washington is now seen through the lens of partisan politics - even the safety of children.

At every step in this still-emerging story, partisans of every stripe worked to protect their political party or hurt the other one, but there's no evidence that anyone ever acted sufficiently - or dared risk his or her party's image - to protect teenage boys from the inappropriate advances of former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla.

That's evident in how the scandal started - when unidentified partisans tried to get Florida newspapers to write stories about Foley's inappropriate e-mails to a 16-year-old boy who'd served as a House page.

They probably were trying either to hurt the Republican incumbent's prospect for re-election or to force him out of the gay closet, another political motive.

And politics is clear in the way Republican leaders in Congress reacted - treating it as a political problem rather than a moral or law enforcement problem.

Consider the reaction when word of the first troubling Foley e-mail was reported to the Republican chairman of the bipartisan House Page Board.

"As chairman of the bipartisan House Page Board," Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., said in his first statement on the matter last Friday, "I took immediate action to investigate."

Yet, despite his own emphasis that he chaired a bipartisan board, Shimkus kept the report secret from the panel's Democrat, Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich.

Instead, he went with the House clerk to see Foley, asked him about the e-mails, was told they were innocent and told Foley to stop.

"In my 21 years as a member of the House Page Board, every decision has been made on not just a bipartisan basis, but on a nonpartisan basis," Kildee said. "I was outraged to learn that the House Republican leadership kept to itself the knowledge of Mr. Foley's despicable behavior toward the House pages."

Why wouldn't Shimkus want bipartisan support? Perhaps he didn't want the Democrats to know about a potential problem in the Republican ranks. But if he'd treated the report as a bipartisan matter, as intended when the board was set up in 1982, there might have been a different outcome.

The full board might well have investigated more deeply. They might have talked to other pages and learned that Foley was a known problem. They could have turned the matter over to the bipartisan House Ethics Committee for resolution, or to law enforcers. Democrats then would have no grounds to blame Republican leaders for shielding Foley's behavior.

Instead, even once the Foley scandal became public, Shimkus treated it as a Republican problem. He huddled for hours with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., then announced that he'd met with pages and that he and Hastert had created a toll-free number for the pages to call to report problems.

Shimkus also said he'd work "in the days ahead" with other members of the Page Board. But bipartisanship still could wait; he hadn't even notified Kildee of the toll-free phone line.

Let's not let Democrats entirely off the partisanship hook.

They've been demanding, rightly, to know precisely what Republican leaders knew about Foley's behavior. Yet they apparently have absolutely no interest in knowing who first got hold of the e-mails and spread them around Florida - without warning the teens in the page program.

Democrats also have been using guilt by association to hurt Republicans in close election fights.

"Foley Sex Scandal Hits Mike DeWine," blared one headline from the party's political operation for Senate campaigns.

How was Ohio Republican Sen. DeWine hit by the sex scandal? Because he declined to say that Hastert and other Republican leaders should resign. Instead he said: " You have to look and see what they knew, what they did about it. I would want to know what they did about it."

That's hardly DeWine getting caught up in a sex scandal. But it's definitely partisan politics. And in Washington- built on a swamp - that's what drives everything, even this sad story, which has plenty of politicians and no heroes.
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Steven Thomma is chief political correspondent for the McClatchy Washington bureau. Write to him at: McClatchy Newspapers, 700 12th St. N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, DC 20005-3994, or e-mail [email protected].

Why Capitol Pages Fear Retaliation
Why Capitol Pages Fear Retaliation
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Monday 02 October 2006

For generations, American parents have sent their high-school-age children to Washington to serve as Capitol Hill pages and to learn about the real world of politics. In the scandal surrounding Rep. Mark Foley's salacious e-mails, it's clear that one lesson the pages learned was to fear Republican retaliation.

It now appears that one of the chief reasons why Foley's e-mails remained secret for so long - and why some former pages still won't speak publicly - is that they recognize that divulging what Foley did to them could kill their hopes for future careers in politics.

This fear of retaliation from today's take-no-prisoners Republican power structure in Washington has been a little-noted subtext to the stories about Foley's sudden resignation on Sept. 29 over his e-mails to pages since 2003.

The congressional pages who received the "creepy" e-mails "didn't do anything beside telling other pages about it," said Matthew Loraditch, 21, who runs the U.S. House Page Alumni Association's Internet message board. Loraditch, a senior at Towson University, explained that three of the former pages have refused to comment, citing fear of long-term damage to their ability to land jobs. [Washington Post, Oct. 2, 2006]

Fear of retaliation also has limited the willingness of adult Republican staffers from commenting about the Foley case.

"One House GOP leadership aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, conceded that Republicans had erred in not notifying the three-member, bipartisan panel that oversees the page system," the Washington Post reported.

Politics of Fear

In a very perverse way, the story of the e-mails and the pages does represent one of the fundamental lessons of working in today's one-party Washington: Whether in politics, intelligence or journalism, avoid doing or saying anything that offends powerful Republicans.

At Consortiumnews.com, we have addressed this politics of fear before, noting many examples of retaliation against reporters, intelligence analysts, political leaders and prominent citizens who have refused to toe the line.

For instance, in understanding why Washington insiders so thoroughly bought into George W. Bush's bogus case for war in Iraq, one has to remember the abuse heaped on anyone who challenged Bush or his rationales.

The critics could expect to be trashed by influential Republicans, taunted by the powerful right-wing media and treated harshly by mainstream news outlets, too.

While Bush rarely joined personally in the attack-dog operations, he maintained a remarkable record of never calling off the dogs, either.

In some cases, such as the punishment of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, Bush did get his hands dirty. The President oversaw a campaign to discredit Wilson - which came to include exposing his wife's covert identity - after Wilson complained about "twisted" intelligence on Iraq. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Did Bush Lie to Fitzgerald?"]

But the more typical Bush-on-the-sidelines approach was illustrated by what happened to the Dixie Chicks, a three-woman country-western band that has faced more than three years of boycotts because lead singer, Natalie Maines, slighted Bush before the invasion.

During a March 10, 2003, concert in London, Maines, a Texan, remarked, "we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Two days later - just a week before Bush launched the Iraq invasion - she added, "I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world."

With war hysteria then sweeping America, the right-wing attack machine switched into high gear, organizing rallies to drive trucks over Dixie Chicks CDs and threatening country-western stations that played Dixie Chicks music. Maines later apologized, but it was too late to stop the group's songs from falling down the country music charts.

On April 24, 2003, with the Iraq War barely a month old, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Bush about the boycott of the Dixie Chicks. The President responded that the singers "can say what they want to say," but he added that his supporters then had an equal right to punish the singers for their comments.

"They shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out," Bush said. "Freedom is a two-way street."

In that way, Bush made clear that he saw nothing wrong with his followers hurting Americans who disagreed with him or who caused him trouble.

As CBS's "60 Minutes" reported in a segment on May 14, 2006, the Dixie Chicks were still haunted by the pro-Bush boycott. "They have already paid a huge price for their outspokenness, and not just monetarily," said correspondent Steve Kroft. Sometimes, Bush supporters even turned to threats of violence.

During one tour, lead singer Maines was warned, "You will be shot dead at your show in Dallas," forcing her to perform there under tight police protection, said the group's banjo player, Emily Robison. In another incident, a shotgun was pointed at a radio station's van because it had the group's picture on the side, Robison said.

"Whoa, Dude!"

Other celebrities who opposed the Iraq War, such as Sean Penn, faced similar treatment. Bush's supporters gloated in 2003 when Penn lost acting work because he had criticized the rush to war.

"Sean Penn is fired from an acting job and finds out that actions bring about consequences. Whoa, dude!" chortled pro-Bush MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough.

Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, cited as justification for Penn's punishment the actor's comment during a pre-war trip to Iraq that "I cannot conceive of any reason why the American people and the world would not have shared with them the evidence that they [Bush administration officials] claim to have of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." [MSNBC transcript, May 18, 2003]

In other words, no matter how reasonable or accurate the concerns expressed by Bush's Iraq War critics, they could expect retaliation.

While highlighting pro-Bush shows like Scarborough's, MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's program because it allowed on too many Iraq War critics. In 2003, MSNBC was determined to wrap itself in the American flag as tightly as Fox News did.

With Bush's quiet encouragement, his supporters also denigrated skeptical U.S. allies, such as France by pouring French wine into gutters and renaming "French fries" as "freedom fries."

Bush's backers also mocked U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix for not finding WMD in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. CNBC's right-wing comic Dennis Miller likened Blix's U.N. inspectors to the cartoon character Scooby Doo, racing fruitlessly around Iraq in vans.

As it turned out, of course, the Iraq War critics were right. The problem wasn't the incompetence of Blix but the fact that Bush's claims about Iraq's WMD were false, as Bush's arms inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer concluded after the invasion.

Political leaders who spoke out faced ridicule, too. In September 2002, when former Vice President Al Gore presented a thoughtful critique of the dangers from "preemptive wars" in general and the Iraq invasion in particular, he was met with a solid wall of denunciations from Fox News to the Washington Post's Op-Ed page.

Some epithets came directly from Bush partisans. Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke dismissed Gore as a "political hack." An administration source told the Washington Post that Gore was simply "irrelevant," a theme that would be repeated often in the days after Gore's speech. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2002]

Conservative opinion-makers took aim at Gore from editorial pages, talk radio and TV chat shows.

"Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered," wrote Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. "It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts - bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible." [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002]

"A pudding with no theme but much poison," declared another Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer. "It was a disgrace - a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence." [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002] At Salon.com, Andrew Sullivan entitled his piece about Gore "The Opportunist" and characterized Gore as "bitter."

History of Fear

But this strategy of using the power of modern media to inject career fear deeply into the Washington political process did not begin with the Iraq War. In many ways, it can be traced back to the 1970s when Republicans felt victimized by the Watergate scandal and the exposure of lies that had been used to justify the Vietnam War.

Conservatives were determined that those twin disasters - losing a Republican President in a devastating political scandal and seeing the U.S. population turn against a war effort - should never happen again.

As I describe in Secrecy & Privilege, the initial targets of the Right's strategy in the 1970s and early 1980s were the national news media and the CIA's analytical division - two vital sources of information at the national level.

The U.S. press was blamed for exposing President Richard Nixon's dirty tricks and for spreading dissension that undermined morale in the Vietnam War. CIA analysts had to be brought under control because the driving rationale for the conservative power grab was to be an exaggerated threat assessment of America's enemies.

If the American people saw the Soviet Union as a leviathan coming to swallow the United States, then they would surrender their tax dollars, their civil liberties and their common sense.

Conversely, if the CIA analysts offered a nuanced view of the Soviet Union as a rapidly declining power falling farther behind the West technologically and desperately trying to keep control of its disintegrating sphere of influence, then Americans might favor a shift in priorities away from foreign dangers to domestic needs. Negotiations with the Soviets - not confrontation - would make sense.

So, one of the first battles fought in this historic neoconservative conquest of the U.S. government occurred largely behind the walls of the CIA, beginning in 1976 (under George H.W. Bush's directorship) with the so-called "Team B" assault on the CIA's fabled Kremlinologists.

In the 1980s, this attack on the professional objectivity of the CIA's analytical division intensified under the watchful eye of CIA Director William J. Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates.

Through bureaucratic bullying and purges, the neocons silenced CIA analysts who were reporting evidence of Soviet decline. Instead, a "politicized" CIA analytical division adopted worst-case scenarios of Soviet capabilities and intentions, estimates that justified the Reagan administration's costly arms buildup and covert wars in the Third World.

This strategy was so successful that the battered CIA analytical division largely blinded itself to the growing evidence of the coming Soviet collapse. Then, ironically, when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990, the neocons were hailed as heroes for achieving the seemingly impossible - the supposedly sudden collapse of the Soviet Union - while the CIA's analytical division was derided for "missing" the Soviet demise.

Pressing the Press

The second important target was the U.S. national press corps. The strategy here was twofold: to build an ideologically conservative news media and to put pressure on mainstream journalists who generated information that undercut the desired message.

The so-called "controversializing" of troublesome mainstream journalists was aided and abetted by the fact that many senior news executives and publishers were either openly or quietly sympathetic to the neocons' hard-line foreign policy agenda.

That was even the case in news companies regarded as "liberal" - such as the New York Times, where executive editor Abe Rosenthal shared many neocon positions, or at Newsweek, where top editor Maynard Parker also aligned himself with the neocons.

In the 1980s, reporters who dug up hard stories that challenged the Reagan administration's propaganda found themselves under intense pressure, both externally from well-funded conservative attack groups and behind their backs from senior editors.

The New York Times' Central America correspondent Raymond Bonner was perhaps the highest profile journalist pushed out of a job because his reporting angered the neocons, but he was far from alone.

The Reagan administration even organized special "public diplomacy" teams to lobby bureau chiefs about ousting reporters who were deemed insufficiently supportive of government policies. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]

To protect their careers, journalists learned that it helped to write stories that would please the Reagan administration and to avoid stories that wouldn't.

The same bend-to-the-right dynamic prevailed in the 1990s as mainstream journalists wrote more harshly about President Bill Clinton than they normally would because they wanted to show that they could be tougher on a Democrat than a Republican.

This approach was not journalistically sound - reporters are supposed to be evenhanded - but it made sense for journalists who knew how vulnerable they were, having seen how easily the careers of other capable journalists had been destroyed. [For an extreme example, see Consortiumnews.com's "America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb."]

The consequences of these changes in journalism and intelligence became apparent when the neocons - the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams - returned to power under George W. Bush in 2001 and especially after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

As happened with the hyping of the Soviet threat in the 1980s, a pliant intelligence community largely served up whatever alarmist information the White House wanted about Iraq and other foreign enemies.

When an individual analyst did challenge the "group think," he or she would be called unfit or accused of leftist sympathies, as occurred when State Department analysts protested Undersecretary of State John Bolton's exaggerated claims about Cuba's WMD. [See Consortiumnews.com's "John Bolton & the Battle for Reality."]

Propaganda Game

Meanwhile, in the mainstream media, news executives and journalists were petrified of accusations that they were "blaming America first" or were "soft on terror" or didn't sufficiently "support the troops."

News executives transformed their networks and newspapers into little more than conveyor belts for the Bush administration's propaganda.

Poorly sourced allegations about Iraq's supposed nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs were trumpeted on Page One of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Skeptical stories were buried deep inside.

This fear of retaliation has continued to spread. Academia is now feeling the heat from right-wingers who want to eliminate what they see as the last bastion of liberal thought. Corporate leaders also appear to be suffering from the paralysis of fear.

After traveling to many American cities in 2005, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman observed that CEOs were staying on the sidelines in crucial debates about education, energy, budgets, health care and entrepreneurship.

"When I look around for the group that has both the power and interest in seeing America remain globally focused and competitive - America's business leaders - they seem to be missing in action," Friedman wrote. "In part, this is because boardrooms tend to be culturally Republican - both uncomfortable and a little afraid to challenge this administration."

So, in the context of Washington political/media society, which has cowered in fear before the Bush administration and its aggressive right-wing allies for years, it shouldn't be surprising that bright high school students who go to Washington to serve as congressional pages would catch on to the most pervasive message of all:

In a one-party political system in which power in concentrated in a few hands, it is not wise to offend the people in charge, even when one of them is writing you sexually offensive e-mails.
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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Most politicians took at least some poly-sci classes as undergrads. Dumpster Diving 101 and Advanced Dumpster Diving 202 are some of the most popular year after year.

Thanks, joe, I've been waiting for someone to make this distinction.

Not sure what distinction is being drawn here. Foley may be a pedophile because of the emails he sent, not because he's gay.

The fact that he's gay has nothing to do with it. I think it's disgraceful the way his lawyer is putting that out there now, along with his so-called alcoholism and his so-called molestation by a clergyman. If you ask me, it's he and his lawyer trying to tie his homosexuality into this, as having some bearing on his predatory nature with these boys.

16 is still a minor, hence, pedaphelia.

And this bs about him never having sex with a minor...if you believe that then, there's this bridge in my backyard I'd like for you to see.

And, even more so, I don't give a damn if he is a pedophile, an ephebophile, or whatver-phile, he's still sick for having internet sex with children.

Cycloptichorn

In the first place, Foley is not a pedophile. He is an ephebophile, as he is attracted to boys who are post-pubescent. Being gay is besides the point. There are plenty of ephebophiles who are attracted to young people of the opposite sex.

I just heard something on the radio where Foley's attorney said that his client takes full responsibility for his actions, and will not use his former abuse as an excuse. So if that is true, why was the abuse even publicized? What a crock!

Joe, did you miss this post?



And this post?



-------------------------


But then again I never said anything of the sort, anyway.

What I said was that when defining Foley as a pedophile or not, it does not make any difference, according to the various definitions we brought here, whether he engaged in actual sexual activity, or merely engaged in fantasies about it. That was after all what we were discussing, you may have noticed - Tico's and Timber's apparent claim that it did.

The question whether the teenagers in question could be counted as children in the first place, I left open explicitly, twice.

But if you really want to know, I dont think, myself, that the definition of "pedophilia" is determined by what the age of consent is in this or that US jurisdiction. A 52-year old was sexually attracted to a 16-year old. Can we consider such a thing pedophilia or not? Citing the age of consent in DC doesnt anwer that question - it only answers the question whether what Foley did was illegal.

Several pages have reported that Foley's attention made them nervous. Foley's behavior is immoral because he is taking advantage of a grossly unequal power relationship.

No, I didn't. I just didn't think that it helped your position at all. I agree that "pedophilia" encompasses both people who have a desire to have sex with children and people who act on that desire (the proper term for the latter is "pederast"). Nevertheless, I see no evidence whatsoever that Foley had any sexual desire, fulfilled or otherwise, for children.


No, we cannot consider the desire to have sex with a 16-year-old to be "pedophilia." To claim otherwise would be to expand the definition of "pedophilia" so that it encompasses those who desire sex with postpubescent teenagers, which renders the definition nonsensical. If, after all, Foley could have legally had sex with these 16-year-olds, it stretches one's credulity to call him a law-abiding pedophile.

In the eyes of the law, a 16-year-old isn't a child, at least with respect to his ability to consent to sex. Thus, to conclude that Foley is "still sick for having internet sex with children" is merely a form of question-begging. You might as well say that "you don't care if Foley is a pedophile, he's still sick for being a pedophile."

Regarding the law, because on that you are the expert, I have a question, btw. How would this complication work out that Little K I think mentioned already, re the case of the sexual online chats between Foley and the 16-year old in California?

Foley was in DC, where the age of consent is 16, but the page in CA, where the age of consent is 18. So if those chats could be argued to be sexual sollicitation or the sort, which age of consent would then apply?

There is an interesting map of ages of consent worldwide here on Wikipedia, btw. Astounding disparities from place to place.

I understand that there are differences between legal definitions and cultural definitions, and that you are going with the legal definition on this one; but that doesn't really matter to me, because as far as I am concerned, 16 is still a child.

I don't think I am the only American who will look at it this way, either.

And, forget about the age, there is still the 'power difference' angle to focus on. Foley was a predator who used his status and influence against the kids who he wanted to prey upon. Some of them probably went to him willingly, others, probably not so much; but his actions, no matter the age of the person in question, were highly unethical and despicable.

Cycloptichorn

I just think it's delightful to see the repubs and their supporters, after years of using the term in a deragatory and smug way (like the smug self righteous bastards they are) scrambling to define what is is....

I agree, but I wonder if the same amount of moral indignation would be generated by the number of people that are outraged if his targets had been 16 year old girls.