Speechless, almost

Help me out here. I blearily opened the paper this morning and found this headline:

Religious leader's ouster raises gay question

Same-sex attraction increasingly recognized as rooted in biology

::blink. blink blink:: Okay, I was up earlier than I wanted to be and hadn't had my tea yet. ::rub rub:: Let's read the article; surely it's not saying what I think it is.

Prominent evangelical Ted Haggard's murky admission of sin following allegations of an affair with a male prostitute has reignited a volatile argument over the roots of homosexuality — a debate where religion, politics and science collide.

Let me see if I'm reading this correctly. "Reignited" implies that the argument about causality of Teh Gay had been settled, and the fact that the ignition source is Reverend Ted's statement that he thinks it's biological implies that the argument has been settled in favor of the "it's a choice" camp. This is insipid. And nuts.

Ted Haggard paid a gay prostitute for sex and meth behind his family's back for three years? All the while decrying homosexuality, saying the Bible's instructions on the matter are cut and dried? And when he finally came out, as it were, he says he's repulsed by this vile temptation, this dark side of his life he was unable to resist?

Oh, well, that settles it, then. If he says it's innate it must be innate. Thank goodness Reverend Ted brought this up; otherwise we would have had no idea that being gay isn't just a choice.

::cough::bullshit::cough::

Seriously, what the fuck is this? Who is the nimrod pounding this crap out for the AP? What rock has he been living under for the past twenty years?

Scientific evidence, though far from conclusive, points strongly toward biological underpinnings of sexual attraction. Many evangelical Christians believe that people can exercise choice over how they deal with same-sex attractions, and some in the movement have begun to acknowledge at least some genetic role.

Evangelicals and science. Always an interesting mixture. Ah, but they still keep their out, still keep the "choice" card tucked into a vest pocket. To wit:

"Whatever the root cause, people make a choice," Chambers said. "Not about their feelings, but about what they do with those feelings based on convictions and not on science."

I love these people. Truly I do. They are better at having their cake and eating it too than just about anyone in America today. Now they--or at least some of them--will grudgingly admit that genetics might have something to do with orientation, but they preserve their cudgel of judgment by asserting that, well, acting on orientation is a choice anyway so it doesn't matter why you're oriented the way you are, we get to condemn you anyway and fight for legislation that will punish you in many insidious ways.

But the argument has been reignited, by God, thanks to Reverend Ted. Why, if he hadn't been outed by Mike Jones we might never have had this discussion in the public arena! We surely never would have suspected that the choice involved being who you are, rather than deciding who you want to be! We'd be condemning people for the wrong thing! Thank you, Reverend Ted!

Gag.

Fantasy Football and Congressional Fantasies, Both Gag-worthy

Sometimes your fantasy NFL team tanking yet again takes on the same significance as the Foley-Kolbe phantasm. Not often. Actually, I'm so used to it that today is probably the last day it will register. Oh, swell. The Broncos just picked off yet another pass. Good thing I'm not in this for cash.

When this happens (not the demise of my team, so much, although it's an apt metaphor for the rest of the world at the moment), I like to pop open a bottle of Red Truck and go through the last month's worth of Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke.

I confess to not paying inordinate attention today to the newest Foley developments. Apparently Jim Kolbe (recently retired representative from Arizona), another inexplicably Republican gay man, knew as far back as 2000 that Foley was behaving inappropriately with the pages. Nothing that's come to light so far suggests that Kolbe himself did anything wrong with the boys (reports indicate he was friendly and generous, but no hints of smoking guns yet), but his minimal actions to rectify the situation (notifying the House clerk) are damning.

Note to the remaining gay Republicans in Congress: knock it off, already. If you get so much as a whiff of impropriety involving one of your gay colleagues and an underage kid, you are obligated to go all Avenging Angel on the guy's ass. Doing the bare minimum that you think will stand up to clear you in court or preserve your committee chairmanship only makes the rest of us--who, by the by, are overwhelmingly interested in getting laid by People Our Own Age--look really, really bad. The Focus on the Family people have the stereotype of the gay sexual predator up there in stark relief. Look in the mirror and see if your actions are perpetuating that stereotype or protecting someone else's efforts to perpetuate it in any way. If so, knock it the hell off.

There.

Requisite Mark Foley Post

In other news, Mark Foley is going for the fundie right-wing gay stereotype trifecta: (1) molested as a kid, (2) substance abuser; (3) sexual predator. Thanks a ton for jumping on that bandwagon, asshole. I'm not even going to address your contorted attempts at justifying or rationalizing or explaining his behavior. You are not the victim here. The kids are.

I will, however, repost a comment I wrote over at Daily Kos earlier in the week, now that more and more rightish commentators are coming out from under their rocks to discuss the technicalities of the boys' ages and, even worse, to suggest that the pages themselves were somehow at fault for Foley's actions. Forthwith:

Attention from an older guy in a position of relative power is a heady, heady thing for a 16-year-old (or, as in my case, 17). It's flattering, it's exciting--wow, he actually wants to talk to me! He wants to take me to dinner! He wants to talk to me about my future career interests! It's exhilarating.

Then he pulls you down on top of him on the couch in his office and jams his tongue down your throat and, wham, it's not fun any more. It's terrifying. Even if you manage to stop things in their tracks, the creepiness and guilt take a long damn time to subside. You don't tell your parents because you don't want them to be angry--whether with you or with your attacker, you're not quite sure--and you don't want them to think (know?) you're stupid enough to have gotten into this situation in the first place. You don't even tell your friends because you don't want them to look at you differently. You look back at everything that led to that awful moment and kick yourself for not putting the brakes on sooner, for not recognizing what was happening until it was too late.

I feel for the kid or kids who are sure to be identified sooner or later as the other parties in the IMs and e-mails. I'm certain my own experience shaded the way I read them, but I sensed the discomfort coming through the kid's side of the messaging. You don't want to go along with where you're being led, but at the same time you don't want to not go along because you think maybe you're misinterpreting and don't want him to cut you off. You don't want him to think you're the one reacting inappropriately.

All the debate about whether Foley is technically really a pedophile or an ephebophile or pederast or just garden-variety sleazebag misses the reality that teenagers are not equipped to deal with sexual situations involving older, more experienced, much more powerful adults. Arguments about terminology and semantics obscure the point: I don't give a rat's ass what the age of consent is in DC, or what that means for the 18-year-old boyfriends of 16-year-old girls. Foley exploited kids who were not experienced enough to know how to handle him. And that's a crime.

Given the developments out of the Foley camp over the past couple of days, I'll add that it's also reprehensible that he's now playing to the fears and stereotypes held by homophobes in an attempt to abnegate his personal responsibility for his actions. That's the funny thing about the anti-homo camp's view of gay people: they think we have the power to choose our orientation, but simultaneously are somehow unable to choose appropriate people to express it with. The reality is that we're just like straight people: you either do the right thing or you don't, and individual orientation has exactly zero to do with that.