Wayne Ezell is the Reader Advocate for The
(Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union. Today, his column
discusses the comparisons between the papers handling
of the Rep. Mark Foley and Sen. Harry Reid scandals as
well as its obituary of former Rep. Gerry Studds. The
comparisons are informative.
Reid, a sanctimonious Democratic Senator from Nevada,
reaped a windfall profit from a land deal and didnt
follow Senate ethics guidelines. From the media,
scarcely a ripple.
The Senate has not censured him nor is it likley to
nor did it censure Sen. Ted Kennedy over the
Chappaquiddick incident. For those too young to know,
Kennedy left the scene of an accident where he drove
off a bridge and left a 29 year old woman trapped
underwater in his car to die. He didnt report the
accident for at least nine hours. Reid should be
censured and so should Kennedy have been and even at
this late date, should be. They are both disgraces,
Kennedy especially. He was guilty of homicide.
For comparison, its good to remember that just 15
years earlier, the Senate had censured Joseph McCarthy
for bringing disrepute upon it. mCCarthy had the
audacity to call communists communists and to try to
ferret out communists in sensitive government
posistions.
As a postscript, Kennedy, had the gall to wail about
one set of standards for the high and mighty, as he
put it, and everyone else, just four years later
during Nixons Watergate scandal which led to fellow
Sen. Barry Goldwater to remark that we could do
without the moralizing of the junior senator from
Massachusetts since we didnt know all the facts of
Chappaquiddick. Kennedy got away, literally, with
murder.
Studds was a Massachusetts congressman from a district
that included Cape Cod with its very large homosexual
population epitomized by Provincetown, at the very
tip. An old fishing village, it has become Bohemian
with the consequent large proportion of homosexuals.
I believe that everyone is entitled to his privacy
and, in the case of elected officials, its up to the
constituents to decide his electoral fate. But in
Studds case, he had an affair with a teenage page.
He was censured but was re-elected and not disowned by
the Democratic leadership during the subsequent
election campaign, at a time when the Democrats were
in control of the House and IN NO DANGER OF LOSING IT.
He should have been banned from the House. The
fact that he was a Democrat was not mentioned in The
T-Us obituary. Foleys Republicanism is mentioned
almost as part of his title.
The Reid case has been allowed to die in the media and
we will likely see little of it, just like the Barney
Frank case was swept under the rug. Barney Frank was
another homosexual congressman from Massachusetts who
came out of the closet during one of his terms. The
jokes flew thick and fast after his announcement with
National Review speculating whether Studds would stand
for re-election in his own district or go after Barney
Franks seat.
Once again, most people shrugged it off, dismissing
his sexuality as something between himself and his
constituents, which is as it should be. However,
later it was revealed that one of Franks staff was
running a homosexual prostitution ring right out of
either his own or Franks town house, and I think it
was Franks. What happened to him? Of course, could
it be any other way? Nothing! The House was in
Democratic hands, just as the Senate was at the time
of the Chappaquiddick incident and the House was
during both the Studds and Frank incidents. Frank
has been re-elected time and again.
Points to ponder. There is no excuse for Foleys
behavior but let's apply rules with some equanimity
and some sense of balance. Human death counts for a
lot more than money and pedophilia for a lot more than
prostitution, at least adult prostitution, although
none should be tolerated.
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