Place blame where it belongs

Inter Lake editorial

A little time has passed since Mark Foley of Florida resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives in disgrace, perhaps enough time to bring some perspective to the situation.

Foley, as everyone surely knows, sent improper e-mails to congressional pages and engaged in sexually explicit chat with at least two minors. When the news of that broke late last month, Foley - a Florida Republican - resigned his seat and entered rehabilitation, supposedly for alcoholism.

There is nothing good to be said about Rep. Foley. Although he no doubt has the chance of redemption available to him, there is no particular reason why the public at large should allow him to ever return to a position of responsibility. He needs to face his demons and should be humbled by his downfall.

If it turned out he had accomplices in his immorality, then they should also be removed from power and made to pay the price of their indiscretions.

But there is a flip side to that as well. People who did not have anything to do with Foley's bad behavior, and who did not engage in their own immoral conduct, should not be pilloried in the press or in political campaign ads as if they had themselves done something wrong.

People in Congress do not share common blame for each others' sins. Each of them has to be judged individually.

That's why talk of institutional corruption in Congress should probably not extend to include sexual indiscretions. It is unlikely that Congress as a whole approves of a member of the House trying to seduce a congressional page. It is also unlikely that Republicans are the only members of Congress who are prone to sins of the flesh.

Should there be evidence of any kind of coverup of illegal behavior by Foley or anyone else, then that should certainly be punished. If Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert put politics ahead of the well-being of the teen-agers who serve as pages, then he should certainly go.

But again, we caution against too much moral indignation.

Chances are, those serving in Congress are no more or less moral than the people in our own churches, our own Legislature, or our own towns.

That's why we have laws and rules and codes of ethics - to protect ourselves and our most vulnerable from the people who would take advantage of them.

Now, we should be letting the legal process work itself out to see who else, if anyone, did anything wrong. Should evidence point at any wrongdoing, action should be taken against the suspects.

The rest of the members of Congress, on the other hand, should have to answer for their votes on the issues of the day, and not for the mistakes of Mark Foley.

And if the public is really serious about its moral indignation, then it should also act with a certain degree of sobriety and responsibility itself. When Mark Foley gets out of treatment, for instance, and becomes the "bad boy du jour" of the talk-show circuit, we should have the intelligence to change the channel.

Let's keep our focus as a nation on solving problems and not turn every moral lapse of every individual politician into the equivalent of a political peep show.

We are better than that.