Chapter 49.7: Just a Thought

If the Republicans hadn't been hammering the anti-gay message as stringently the past six years or more, would the Mark Foley scandal have been as damaging to them? As the Republicans have been saying since the sexually explicit messages were exposed, a Democratic representative in the 1980s had been accused of at least once having an allegedly inappropriate relationship with a page and didn't pay a price as steep as Foley (and, likely, the GOP). But gays weren't as hot a political potato back then. These days, when same-sex unions are a campaign issue, anything that has any veneer of covert homosexual connotations among politicians apparently is as much a career killer as talking about changing Social Security used to be.