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PHIL LAPADULA
Friday, October 13, 2006
As the “Foley fallout” continued to descend on the mid-term elections this week, several national gay activists voiced concerns that some of the toxic political dust from the sex scandal could land on gays and lesbians.
Gay activists of both political parties denounced anti-gay conservatives whom they said were trying to shift the blame for the congressional page scandal from former Congressman Mark Foley and the House Republican leadership’s alleged cover-up, to homosexuality itself.
Foley resigned Sept. 29 after sexually explicit e-mails that he sent to underage male pages surfaced in the media.
Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, described the response to the Foley scandal as “shockingly homophobic.” He objected to what he characterized as anti-gay remarks about the scandal by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan and the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins.
“The GOP leadership and their supporters are trying to deflect blame by making gay people scapegoats,” Foreman said. “The media coverage has been not only salacious but completely unbalanced.”
On the Oct. 1 broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” Gingrich said the House Republican leadership “would have been accused of gay bashing” if it had “overly aggressively reacted” to initial warnings about Foley’s e-mails.
Commenting on the Foley scandal in a recent edition of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” conservative pundit Pat Buchanan asserted that gay men are disproportionately involved in pedophilia. He said gays are responsible for 30 percent of pedophilia cases even though they represent only 3 to 5 percent of the U.S. population. Buchanan did not identify the source of his data on pedophilia.
Later, on the Oct. 5 edition of “Scarborough Country,” also on MSNBC, Buchanan accused House minority leader Nancy Pelosi of “hypocrisy” for denouncing House Republicans for mishandling the Foley scandal. Buchanan said Pelosi “has marched in Gay Pride parades in which they’ve had floats of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which wants to eliminate all age of consent laws.”
Tony Perkins, president of the anti-gay Family Research Council, blamed the Foley scandal on “diversity” and tolerance of homosexuality without actually using the word gay.
“We are all shocked by this spectacle of aberrant sexual behavior, but we shouldn’t be,” Perkins wrote in a statement on the group’s website. “This is the end result of a society that rejects sexual restraints in the name of diversity. Maybe it’s time to question: when is tolerance just an excuse for permissiveness?”
Perkins made similar anti-gay comments about the Foley scandal during an appearance on “Hardball.”
Regarding Gingrich’s explanation that the Republican leadership didn’t investigate because they would be accused of gay bashing, Foreman said, “That’s just ludicrous.” He noted that Republicans “have never hesitated to resort to gay bashing in the past.”
Foreman noted that Buchanan and others have also been making references on talk shows to a “gay mafia” in Washington, Foreman said.
“They claim that this shadowy group of closeted gay Republicans closed ranks to protect Foley and is responsible for preventing the right-wing agenda from moving forward in Congress,” Foreman said.
Foreman said he is most concerned about anti-gay activists claiming that gays are disproportionately involved in pedophilia, which he referred to as a false statement “that leads to violence and discrimination.”
In response, Foreman said he has been disseminating a Task Force pamphlet titled “The Truth About Child Sexual Abuse and Homosexuality.” The pamphlet references two peer-reviewed studies of convicted child molesters published in “Pediatrics” and “Archives of Sexual Behavior.” Less than one percent of the child molesters in the “Pediatrics” study were found to be gay or lesbian and zero percent of the molesters in the “Archives of Sexual Behavior” study were found to be gay or lesbian, the Task Force pamphlet notes.
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