Scandalous

About a year ago, Mark Foley, a Republican congressional representative from Florida, resigned because it was discovered that he had sent sexually explicit electronic messages to teenage boys.

And now, not to be outdone by his erstwhile colleague, Republican Senator Larry Craig has utterly shamed himself by allegedly soliciting sex in an airport bathroom.

Big surprise: these politicians, who are members of the party that considers itself the American model of moral probity, are also enormous hypocrites. But there's a disturbing trend that emerged in the media coverage of both of these stories. With both the Foley scandal and the current Craig scandal, the media have put too much emphasis on the question of whether or not these men are gay.

Being gay shouldn't be the issue here; the issue in both of these stories should be that these men are violating the law and exhibiting moral depravity. But by the way the media cover the scandals, they often make it seem like being gay itself constitutes the entire scandal.

Who cares if Mark Foley is gay? He was sending sexually explicit messages to teenagers! Isn't that awful regardless of whether the teenage victims of his perversion were male OR female?

And again, with Larry Craig: he, a married man, was cruising for sex in an airport bathroom. Isn't that reprehensible whether or not the complete stranger he wanted to proposition was a man OR a woman?

The homosexual leanings of these men should only enter the story insofar as to expose the hypocrisy of their conservative positions against gays. When the media make it seem like being gay is a scandalous issue in and of itself, they're simply contributing to the same damaging national atmosphere of homophobia that these hypocritical Republicans and their colleagues have worked so hard to perpetuate.