On the grounds that we can’t have too many aging rightwing teen columnists telling us what the Foley Affair really means, let’s now turn the floor over to Hans “Last Defender of the Boy Scouts” Zieger, who will explain that what’s really going on here is “The death of manliness.”
Mark Foley is a sick man in a sick culture. He apparently was abused by a priest as a child, and then he, too, abused House pages (how extensively is uncertain) before it ruined him. By the way, as his attorney affirmed on Tuesday, Mark Foley “is a gay man.”
Aside from the political tides generated by Foley’s resignation, there are much larger cultural tsunamis swashing round.
Hans, don’t you mean, “swishing around”?
The Foley scandal intensifies the strain on relationships between youth and adults. It is particularly damaging for relations between old men and young men, or between men and boys, or between young men and boys. [...]
But why must we be suspicious of men in this age more than in others?
Yeah, it’s the damned boys that we should be suspicious of, because they seem to be the constant in this equation.
Because related immediately to the problem between adults and youth is the problem of homosexuality. [...]
The Boy Scouts insist that their policies banning homosexuals and their policies to prevent pedophilia are separate, but there is an evident link between homosexuality and pedophilia. When I made this claim on Penn and Teller’s Showtime Network program, Penn Gillette shot back with a mountain of profanity, because there really can be no substantial answer to the charge.
How dare Gillette fail to provide a substantial answer to Hans’s unsubstantiated charge that there is an “evident link” between homosexuality and pedophilia?
Men who determine to have sex with other men find an easy target with boys.
Just like men who determine to have sex with women find an easy target in six-month old girls. Sure, some heterosexuals might claim that not all of them are attracted to babies, but there can be no substantial answer to my charge.
In the absence of manliness — of strength, virtue, courage — men find open seasons for gratification, and then boys find an open route to Gomorrah,
Or gonorrhea
especially if that route is advertised enthusiastically by a conspiracy of cultural influences. The route then is a rout — from marriage, from family, from community, and not least from God.
I suppose I should challenge Hans’s unwarranted claims, but I come not to rebut him, I come to admire his purple prose. So, let’s skip over his claim that “It is not merely that there are fewer persons of homosexual orientation, but that there are none,” and go straight to his dramatic conclusion:
Thus lies manhood perverted on the grounds of the nation. It knows no purpose. It cannot defend itself; it cannot defend the ladies. Uninstructed in beauty and maturity, it preys upon innocence and childhood. But it is castrated. The best it knows to do is to check itself, like Mark Foley, into a clinic in hopes of some recovery. Yet real manliness does not dwell within a rehab center, or in Congress, and just where it does dwell is now a challenge to know. The simple quiet of manliness is drowned by the metallic screams and the roars and the hideous emotive sighs of deranged wimps, if indeed it is manliness down there beneath it all.
When we read that, I think we all shed a tear for poor, perverted, castrated manliness, lying there on the ground of the nation, being drowned by the metallic screams of deranged wimps.
At least, I know I did.