"Innocent" "Naughty" "Innocuous"

My kids get emails like this from their uncle all the time.  What's the fuss about?

So many, many things wrong with all of this.  The one that blows my mind the hardest though is the continued repitition of characterising the email in question as "innocuous" or "innocent" or at its worst "naughty".  Uhhhh, if a grownup; a 50 something year old to boot, were to write your teenaged sibling, child, family member and ask them to send a picture of themselves and ask what sort of birthday gift was hoped for ...  would you send them to play Michael's ranch?  WTF??  Sigh.

The other thing that keeps irking me is the continued conflating of homosexuality and kiddy diddling.  Commentors are saying things like "if we don't allow gay scoutleaders ....." and "well, he's gay but we didn't want to assume ...." and that drives me mad.  Foley's sexual orientation is that of a dirty old man.  Period. 

Furthermore, I'm not buying his mea culpa of "oh, I'm not a predator except when I'm drunk and oh, I've been drunk for years but that's because I got molested by clergy and now I'm ready to get help for my problem".

I don't want a witch hunt but I do want to know why the entire Board of Pages wasn't informed since apparently it was an open secret that Foley made a number of the pages uncomfortable.

And really, I'm disgusted that this wasn't brought out and dealt with long before this.  I mean, there are certainly more pressing issues before us than the fact that some old dude in power was looking for hot, young sex.

Andrew, oh Andrew Sullivan .... honey, you got some issues.

It boggles my mind that  Hastert, Fordham, Reynolds, et al  are offering the  explanation  of "well, we asked  him and he lied to us but what else were we supposed to believe?"  Um, you ask the person who is being accused of inappropiate behaviours if they're being inappropiate and their denial is all it takes to reassure you??  So you're not corrupt, just incredibly fucking stupid.