05 October 2006
Why all the fuss about Foley’s boy-loving?
3:34 PM
Some of the people who are supposed to be in a tizzy about Foley’s communications with page boys are, let’s be honest, conservative Christians. Hopefully, they will be so demoralized, at last, that they just do the right thing and stay home this election season, there being (surely!) no party morally upstanding enough to deserve their vote.
The Democrat Party is the party of the educated, the sophisticated. As we all know, Christians are largely uneducated, not very literate, easily lead, anti-science, anti-intellectual, and so forth. As all educated people know, boy-loving has a long and distinguished history among intelligentsia and sophisticates. I mean, if people of the caliber of Plato, Socrates, Alcibiades, Xenophon could be fans of it (read Plato’s Symposium), how could any educated person think it relevant what conservative Christians think? It is of the essence of the upper-crust to think highly of such liaisons. Really, only the troglodytes in the middle and lower classes would have a problem, as VDH explains:
[F]or the vast majority of rural folk in the Mediterranean world, heterosexuality and marriage were, of course, the norms. The pre-Christian poor and agrarian classes considered homosexual acts deviant, not on religious grounds of sinfulness, but rather as proof of corruption and decadence that were the wages of too much money and too much time in town.
Yet among an urban sophisticated elite of both Greece and Rome, in the symposium and palaestra, older men's interest in feminine companionship and sexuality was not delineated by gender alone, but more along the lines of youth and appearance. In such a rarefied world of Plato's Symposium or Petronius' Satyricon, feminine-looking boys often were openly seen as desirable sex partners — as long as such idealized relationships reflected the pretense of imparting education and remained one-sided.
Actually, when you think about it, Democrats ought to be celebrating Foley as one Republican who’s with it—you know, on the DL, and stuff. But for the political hay they seek to make of it, Democrats would be leaving this all alone, especially when you compare Gerry Studds (who actually had sex with a minor page, as I’ve already mentioned) with Mark Foley (who apparently only engaged in communications). It took Democrats ten years to respond to allegations regarding Studds. And they want to talk about Republican incompetence on this issue.
And hypocrisy—they want to talk about that too.
The Democrat Party is the party of the educated, the sophisticated. As we all know, Christians are largely uneducated, not very literate, easily lead, anti-science, anti-intellectual, and so forth. As all educated people know, boy-loving has a long and distinguished history among intelligentsia and sophisticates. I mean, if people of the caliber of Plato, Socrates, Alcibiades, Xenophon could be fans of it (read Plato’s Symposium), how could any educated person think it relevant what conservative Christians think? It is of the essence of the upper-crust to think highly of such liaisons. Really, only the troglodytes in the middle and lower classes would have a problem, as VDH explains:
[F]or the vast majority of rural folk in the Mediterranean world, heterosexuality and marriage were, of course, the norms. The pre-Christian poor and agrarian classes considered homosexual acts deviant, not on religious grounds of sinfulness, but rather as proof of corruption and decadence that were the wages of too much money and too much time in town.
Yet among an urban sophisticated elite of both Greece and Rome, in the symposium and palaestra, older men's interest in feminine companionship and sexuality was not delineated by gender alone, but more along the lines of youth and appearance. In such a rarefied world of Plato's Symposium or Petronius' Satyricon, feminine-looking boys often were openly seen as desirable sex partners — as long as such idealized relationships reflected the pretense of imparting education and remained one-sided.
Actually, when you think about it, Democrats ought to be celebrating Foley as one Republican who’s with it—you know, on the DL, and stuff. But for the political hay they seek to make of it, Democrats would be leaving this all alone, especially when you compare Gerry Studds (who actually had sex with a minor page, as I’ve already mentioned) with Mark Foley (who apparently only engaged in communications). It took Democrats ten years to respond to allegations regarding Studds. And they want to talk about Republican incompetence on this issue.
And hypocrisy—they want to talk about that too.
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About Me
- James Frank Solís
- Former soldier (USA). Graduate-level educated. Married 26 years. Texas ex-patriate. Ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.
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