Floyd Brown called homosexuality a “punishment” and said that Republican legislators are intimidated by gay staff members who live to work all day and have sex all night.
Lawmakers,
following a request from the House Ethics Committee, are
surveying aides and former House pages to find out if any of
them had knowledge of ex-congressman Mark Foley's
inappropriate conduct toward male pages.
House speaker
Dennis Hastert's job is on the line as members of the
Ethics Committee decide how to launch a credible
investigation of former congressman Mark Foley's
salacious computer messages to teenage pages.
One of the few
out politicians on Capitol Hill, Democratic congressman
Barney Frank of Massachusetts (who survived his own
scandal involving a male prostitute in 1989) gives us
his take on Foley and on being a gay politician in
Washington.
The scapegoating
of gay people in light of the scandal
surrounding disgraced former congressman Mark Foley is
nothing new. It is a tactic honed in the dark days of
the Cold War during the McCarthy-led "purge of
the perverts."
The conservative Democrat announced his retirement from the Senate, sparking speculation about the future political landscape and a potential third-party presidential run.
Overseers of the
House of Representatives' page program this week
discussed a camping trip that Republican congressman Jim
Kolbe of Arizona took with two former interns and
others in 1996--an outing now under review by
the Justice Department, a congressional source said Tuesday.
President Bush on
Wednesday called ex-congressman Mark Foley's conduct
regarding House male pages ''disgusting'' and expressed
support for Speaker Dennis Hastert's efforts to
determine how officials handled the problem.
