Oct 13, 2006  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

Family Research Council and Focus on the Family have sought to link the Foley scandal to the “homosexual lifestyle,” editorials and columnists in newspapers across the country have denounced such efforts as unfair and unfounded.

Patrick Sammon, the acting head of Log Cabin Republicans, a national gay GOP group, has appeared on national television news programs to caution against blaming the scandal on Foley’s status as a formerly closeted and now openly gay man.

“Predictably, anti-gay groups have used this awful situation to push their divisive agenda,” Sammon said in an Oct. 10 statement. “They continue pushing false stereotypes about gay men preying on young people — stereotypes that have no basis in science or fact,” he said.

Sammon called Foley’s behavior “despicable,” saying he “abused the power of his office, violated the trust of the voters, and preyed upon young people.” But he added that Foley’s “sexual orientation is irrelevant to this story” and that such behavior is shameful “regardless of the perpetrator’s sexual orientation.”

The Post, meanwhile, published an excerpt of a 2003 instant message exchange between a former House page and Foley in which the page referred to Trandahl as a strict disciplinarian who would not tolerate improper behavior among pages.

 “[W]ell we dont have the [expletive] clerk to fire us anymore …,” the Post quoted the former page as saying, in discussing his plans to attend a page reunion event in D.C.  “[W]e didnt like Trandahl that much…he isnt a nice guy…and he gets really scary when he is mad,” the page told Foley in the instant message exchange.

Trandahl left his job as House clerk in November 2005 to become executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Some have speculated that his announced resignation as clerk in September 2005, to take the wildlife foundation job, may have been linked to the Foley affair since it occurred around the same time he and Fordham and other House GOP staffers discussed Foley’s e-mail contact with a 16-year-old House page from Louisiana.

In that e-mail, Foley asked the former page for his photograph, prompting the page to inform his parents that Foley was acting inappropriately. House GOP leaders warned Foley not to have any further contact with the former page after learning about the e-mail, and Foley promised to comply with their directive.

Hastert and other House Republican leaders claimed they did not learn about other, sexually explicit instant messages that Foley sent to other teenage former pages several years earlier until ABC News disclosed those communications two weeks ago.