Paging Mark Foley!

Although I have given thought a few times to being a parent, various news events of the past week have convinced me to stick to fathering little ones of the four-legged variety. That too is not without heartache but at least I don’t have to worry about school shootings or naughty IMs from closeted, southern “Christian” gentlemen. While I can take some pleasure in knowing that this could give power back to the Democrats, there is no reason to believe that they too won’t get mired into a sex scandal. Isn’t this almost like the heady days of the late 1990s when the only real stories coming out of DC were about politicians with open flies? And has there ever been a statistical analysis to see if male Democrats on the Hill are more likely to end up with fleshy female interns while Bible thumping GOP’ers tend to gravitate to fresh-faced boys with upper-end SAT scores. Maybe Jim McGreevey contradicts that theory, but at least he was chasing a younger male past the age of consent.

So a plan is in place to get down to the root cause of all of this by eliminating the source of Mr. Foley's transgression: the page program itself. Translation: the root cause of middle-aged, closeted Republicans pursuing teenaged boys is the boys themselves. Or to root out child abuse, eliminate children. Right? How dare those young boys tantalize those poor closeted senators and representatives with their sleek swimmer bodies wedged into khakis and oxford cloths. Let's fill the capital with nothing but frumpy women in sensible shoes.

Why should we be sending 18-year-old boys to Washington, DC, to be put in harm’s way when they could be shipped off to Iraq anyway? And now to learn that Mr. Foley is gay, but let's make sure the world know that he was molested as a boy by a member of the clergy. Well, I'm gay but I was never molested by a clergy member. I did, in 11th grade, seduce my civics student teacher who had been a page when he was a junior in high school, but that's another story. I think he went on to work for Trent Lott or something. Ew, I just had a vision of Trent sending me an IM with a jpeg of him with his wig and suit folded up in the corner while he sits before the camera whistling Dixie.

By the way, for clarity, that’s Foley leering at my 15-year-old self. Spooky, yes, but I wonder what he looked like back then? Wait, wasn't that student teacher's name Mr. Foley?