Early Democratic Pickup In Florida?
Dean
Well it doesn't look like Republicans will manage to retain Mark Foley's seat, does it?
I actually feel somewhat sorry for people like Foley, assuming he really is a pedophile. I don't think people who have those urges are inherently evil, I think there's something badly screwed up in their brain chemistry. They ought to be offered treatments like castration until more effective treatments come along.
If true, that's incredible.
St. Pete Times
"It's a choice, they choose to act on their urges, rather that control them" FINE, since they obviously value their own wants and desires FAR above those that they choose to befriend, seduce, and rape, and further do so knowing the consequences, lock them up and throw away the key.
"It's a lifestyle decision, age shouldn't matter, love is all that counts" - FINE, since we can't put down ANYONES lifestyle decisions anymore, let's just classify any and every action base on urges and desires to be equally important. Who am I to say that John and Johnny can't have a meaningful healthy relationship. Besides, you never really know someone until you've had a chance to eat them.
I would never go so far as to say "age shouldn't matter"; but I'm also not sure I can call relations with 16 year olds a disease, either. In a lot of cultures past and a few still today, 16 is plenty old enough, and no one would frown at it. (Of course, in many of those cultures, the fact that both parties are male would lead to plenty of frowning.)
Now the age gap matters more, in my opinion. That pushes it closer to a disease or an assault: either the older party is emotionally crippled and can only deal with immature partners, or the older party likes to use his advanced experience and knowledge and power to dominate weaker partners.
More immediately, it's a crime, flat out. And it's stupid, given Mr. Foley's role in passing sex crimes laws about this very sort of thing. And the very stupidity -- what, in all the debate on the topic, he never heard of a case like this and didn't know how easy it was to get caught? -- leads me to believe the disease hypothesis in this case. Either he was too egomaniacal to believe it could happen to him, or he knew he would get caught and just couldn't stop himself, or he's too stupid to understand that he would get caught, or he's delusional, or he didn't care if he got caught, or he wanted to get caught. I would call any one of those a sick point of view.
And if you're looking at religious sources, you won't find many that set the minimum age for these things as high as we do now in current America.
Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing that we've ratcheted up the age requirements, but as far as age of consent goes, we've been ratcheting that up for quite some time now and not the other way around. Honestly, it seems a little goofy to me that we expect sexually mature young people to stay virgins for a decade or more.
None of this really impacts on the Foley case by the way, but if the implication is that somehow society is growing MORE tolerant of sexual relations with young people? No, it's growing less and less tolerant of it all the time.
The other question is simply: why did the party initially declare that the claims about it were smears if they knew different, even if they believed it wasn't as serious as reported?
And why did Boehner change his story from the bizarrely specific "he told me he was taking care of it" to the "I don't recall" to "I never told him about it"? Where did the "told me he was taking care of it" come from if he never discussed the matter with the rest of the leadership.
Perhaps this is like the amsuing quote from recent Abramoff emails to Rove's office: "best not to put this stuff down in writing"
But in most other cases? Harmless nonsense. Back when I was 22 or 23, I used to wear a t-shirt that said, "Party Naked." I don't have that t-shirt anymore, but I thought it was funny at the time, and I'm not going to apologize for it now.
There is an informal, totally humorous group of bloggers that's been around for the last 3-4 years who display a "Blog Nekkid" icon on their sites. This includes more than one blogger I respect, including more than one highly read one. Heck, just do a web search on "Blog Nekkid" and you'll find some humorous postings from well-known bloggers. And if your reaction is vile disgust, you're being incredibly silly--its like getting offended if someone says, "I'm naked under my clothes." Come off it.
Just read the Washington Post article I linked, and look at it, and look solely at the emails that the Post quoted from. Just look at those alone (we'll leave aside the quotes from chat sessions, which only surfaced recently and were the motivation for Foley's resignation). Ignoring the chat sessions, and just looking at the emails, what is there?
They may look weird. But they may be harmless. Based on the emails the Washington Post quoted, I could not say more to the Congressman beyond, "Dude, you'd better not do this, you're skirting the edge."
And just imagine you got 435 employees. And you got these vague emails forwarded to you about "send me your picture" or "I'm relaxing in my jockey shorts right now, what are you up to?" What are you gonna do, launch a massive public investigation?
I am not trying to defend the Congressman. I'm trying to defend anyone who was trying not to overreact to something that may have seemed borderline.
This is not to say anything more than that. Hastert may have been incredibly derelict but so far I'm not seeing evidence of that.
Fu*k him.
Denny Hastert is really beginning to disgust me...
Relentlessly put out a barrage of overt sexuality and, surprise!, you'll start to get more and more depraved sexuality out there - the thing about titillation is that once a thing has done it for you, it won't do it for you again - at least, not at the same level of intensity...you'll need madder music and stronger wine, just to try and get the sensation of that first thrill.
No one wakes up one fine morning and says, "hey, know what?, I'm going to start hitting up children for sex". While Foley might have all sorts of genetic and pschological baggage which made him inclined towards this perversion, it still took time to go from inclination to action. My bet is that he went for years skirting the edges of this, all the while thinking to himself, "at least I'm not as bad as those who actually do it"...until, one day, just looking at it and thinking about it wasn't enough.
We're going to continue to get more and worse of this just so long as we continue to pretend that an "anything goes" society can remain healthy.
And I'll note that at this point the political joke about "a dead girl or a live boy" has been around for decades now, and pederasty--real pederasty and not just some possibly titillating emails--has been around for thousands of years. What data tells us that it's now a more prevalent or pressing problem?
To me it is self-evident and is certainly a much better argument than assertions that since this sort of thing has happened for ages, there is nothing we can do to reduce its frequency, or that there has been no increase of it over the past few decades.
"Men are pigs", goes the joke - and like all jokes, there is a kernel of truth in that. We, all of us, have within us the capacity to become positively demonic in our lives. As I said, Foley almost certainly didn't start out in life to be the deviant he's become - as in all things human, it is a step by step process.
My contention is that we've made the steps a lot easier in our modern world. Percentage-wise, there's just as many potential perverts as there has always been (ie, 100% of the population), but where we might have only had 1 or 2 percent going completely wrong in the past, the easy access to depraved example and encouragement is making 4 or 5 percent go bad these days (the percentages I've used here are just for illustration, of course). The number that go completely wrong are still a very small number of the whole, but that you're still statistically unlikely to be victimised by such people is cold comfort for those who have been victimised - especially for those who would not have been victimised if we had a healthy attitude about such matters (and "healthy" doesn't mean "anything goes"...indeed, to be genuinely healthy in sexual matters is to be exceptionally sober and careful about the whole matter - and this goes for straight, gay and bisexual...the more respect you have for the act and for the person you are doing it with, the less likely is there to be any resultant problems).
I can't, of course, make anyone do anything - but unless and until we start to wise up and start insisting upon some minimal standards of decency, we're just going to slide further and further down this destructive path.
And therein lies the problem, and Dean's point. Since you have to make up percentages out of thin air, that means that you really don't know if the problem's more or less prevalent today than in the past. I think we're all more aware of it; but awareness and prevalence are independent factors, and can even be inversely correlated.
I think one can make a good argument for minimal standards of decency; but without data to back it up, the slippery slope is a poor argument. It only persuades those who already agree with you.