THE cyber sex scandal that has led to the resignation of US Rep. Mark Foley is not about his sexuality (he has admitted to being gay) or even his sexual history (he has also publicly "confessed" to having been molested by a clergyman in his youth), but more about his hypocrisy.

Foley resigned after staffers of a TV news show told him that it was airing a story about sexually explicit e-mail messages he had sent a teenage congressional page. Pages serve in the House of Representatives as messengers and ushers and are nominated by their local congressional representatives, chosen from among the youths with a special interest in government and politics.

Once Foley's inappropriate messages were made public, other former pages—one of them as young as 16, and another who served as a page in 1997, long before House leaders thought Foley began propositioning the young men—came out with their own accounts of being approached by the Florida congressman.

The flak surrounding Foley has since spilled out to entrap the top echelon of the Republicans in the House, including Speaker Dennis Hastert who— while accepting responsibility for the way he and other party-mates had handled the issue saying "the buck stops here"—continues to enjoy the public support of President George W. Bush.

A former chief of staff of Foley's has told reporters that he had talked three years ago with top aides of the Speaker about the congressman's dealings with pages. This contradicts Hastert's assertion that he and his staff learned about Foley's e-mails to pages only last week, when the scandal broke out. It has also emerged that Rep. John Shimkus, also a Republican, who oversees the page program, had already "admonished" Foley about his continued contact with the page, but did nothing else to ensure that the unseemly relations ended, or to investigate whether other pages were involved.

"Could we have done it better? Could the page board have handled it better? In retrospect, probably yes," Hastert said. "But at the time, what we knew and what we acted upon was what we had."

Added Hastert: "I don't know who knew what when .... If it's members of my staff that didn't do the job, we will act appropriately."

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LENDING a touch of sleaze to this cyber sex scandal is that Foley, described by friends and allies as gregarious, if a little star-struck, made his first impact in Florida politics as a defender of child rights, making a name as a champion of children and a defender against pedophiles and other sexual predators.

Which is not to say that as a gay man, he had no right to champion children's causes. Despite the cliché, not all gay men target boys as objects of sexual desire, and not all pedophiles are necessarily gay.

An article in the New York Times noted that for over 12 years in Congress, Foley "became extraordinarily adept at projecting a magnetic public persona—helped along by loyal aides and a sister he breezily called his surrogate wife— while conducting a private life fraught with more secrets than anyone imagined."

Friends now say that they had known about Foley's being gay but did not discuss it with him. But his confessions about his being an alcoholic and being molested by a priest when he was a teenager, "left friends even more stunned, and skeptical," the Times reported.

His friends and supporters also say they understand why Foley would keep his sexual preferences a secret, or at least as low-key as it could be, given the conservatism of his Catholic parents and of the political circles he moved in. But now the former congressman's associates question his claims of molestation, saying that even if it were true, "it sounded too much like excuse-making." And while Foley's lawyers claim their client was an alcoholic who sent those e-mail messages while drunk, his friends in Florida say they rarely saw him holding a drink.

"'It sounds more like the advice of a topnotch criminal defense lawyer,' said Rodney Romano, a former mayor of Lake Worth, the scrappy town where Foley grew up," the Times reported.

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THE PICTURE that emerges from Foley's efforts to survive as a conservative Republican with a special interest in children's causes, while trying to live with his sexual choices, is of a deeply conflicted man who, because he had gotten away with it for so long, pushed the envelope of appropriate behavior to its utmost.

In Florida, friends say he had a longtime companion, a dermatologist based in Palm Beach, and was even seen with him publicly. But he never discussed this aspect of his life with friends or family. And there are those who believe that "a long time ago … Foley had an unspoken contract with the Republican Party to keep it quiet."

"I think they were willing to overlook it as long as he stayed in the closet," said a friend. "I don't know how he behaved in Washington, but down here the topic was always public issues and not personal lives."

Of course, the sexually explicit e-mail messages, which have yet to be made public, would not have been "right" given the "moral ascendancy" Foley enjoyed over the teenage boys, and even if he had "outed" himself as a gay congressman.

But one wonders if the former Florida lawmaker would have been driven to such underhanded behavior if he hadn't felt forced to conceal a vital, essential part of his person, and allowed to get away with inappropriate behavior for so long.

Sure, everyone makes mistakes. But Republicans have made no bones about feasting on the mistakes of everyone else—including a sitting President—and their behavior with regard to Foley taints them with hypocrisy as well.

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