The Party of Sociopathy

[ritaxis]

On the whole Mark Foley thing, I almost agree with Susie Bright (hi, neighbor!).

Nasty old hypocritical Republican congressmen hitting on 16 year old boys considered to be mature enough to hold down a job in Congress is sleazy and foul, but it's just not the crime of the month, let alone the crime of the year. Particularly not in a year that's seen the Constitution dismantled, torture put forward as a routine tool of international criminal investigation, the Abramoff scandals, and oh dog too many heinous crimes to list in this space.

Here's where I have my own take on it though. Foley's behavior expresses something. It expresses the emptiness of Republican rhetoric:, yes, and the fact that any position a Republican takes on any issue is mere manipulation and has nothing to do with principle, policy, or feeling, yes: but what it most expresses is the sociopathic nature of the twenty-first century Republican leadership. At the core, the party is the party of socipathy. What distinguishes the Republican Party is that its leadership sees the world as a bunch of things for their use. Including other human beings.

Honestly, based on what I know of human development, I think sixteen is a mighty fine age of consent. Even if we had sixteen as an age of consent, though, Foley's behavior would be sleazy. Not because he came on to somebody: because he abused a position of power to come on to somebody. And not just because he's a lying hypocrite who has been busy trying to interfere with teens' free access to the net on the grounds that he wants to protect them from "sexual predation." It's because he's actually been working hard at making teens more vulnerable to advances like his. Think about it: that's what all that cybersafety crap does.

And while we're clarifying things, let's think about that word "sexual predator." When the phrase was coined, it seemed to be about distinguishing the person who seduces inappropriately, or the person who behaves inappropriately with respect to sex, or the person who has a violent episode or two, from the sociopath who makes a lifestyle of damaging other people, who plans and plots and stalks, who makes a career of it. A person who can't be fixed with a jail sentence or a run of therapy, because it's not about knowing how to behave, it's about inherently not recognizing human beings as human beings.

So why is it now that every person who does a bad sexual thing is called a sexual predator? It leaves us with no way to talk about the different kinds of bad things, and the different kinds of people who do them. It leaves us unable to have a conversation about different remedies appropriate to different problems. Oh, right. That's why. We're not supposed to be thinking of different kinds of criminals and different kinds of remedies for their crimes.

Except: if the criminal is a rich person, and most especially a Republican, then we're supposed to think they're different from other criminals, and they're supposed to go to an addiction clinic instead of going to trial.

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Or as Tony Snow put it, Foley only sent some "naughty e-mails".

[carandol.livejournal.com]

If I understand it correctly, the age of consent for gay sex in the UK is 16, but it's an offence for someone in a position of authority to have gay sex with someone under the age of 18 in his/her care.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

In Canada, the laws are very complicated, but essentially, if you have sex with someone within a year or two of your age, it's OK from 13, but the older you are and the more under 18 they are, the more criminalised it is. So if one of you is 17 and one 19, no problem, if 20 or 21, provisionally OK, if 50, jail sentence. It's a sort of sliding age-of-consent to 18, which acknowledges that teenagers have sex with each other but you don't want them to be taken advantage of by adults. Oh, and no difference by gender.

At first I thought this was really weird, but the more I thought about it the more sense it made.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Generally, I agree. What Foley is doing would be inappropriate if he were doing it with of-age women--it's harassment, and I say the hell with it. It's worse, I think, that he's harassing underage young men; I do think a few years makes a difference there, but compared to what's been done in Iraq, this is nothing.

But--it looks like this is how the media are going to bring the Republicans down without ever actually admitting that the media participated in, and continues to participate in, the horrors the radical right has visited on the USA. I'd rather the radical right leadership faced a war crimes tribunal, but I won't weep that they lose the House to a cheap sex scandal.

Ay, politics.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

There may be good side-effects, though, in that there's a call for Hastert and others who knew early to resign.