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<DIV><TR><TD valign="top"><SPAN class=bluebold16><FONT size=4>From:
<EM>This Week</EM>, 10/20/2006</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT size=4><FONT size=3><SPAN class=bluebold16>It’s Not About a Gay Man,
But a Man’s Gaze </SPAN><BR><BR>10/13/2006<BR><BR>When I first noticed grown men
ogling my daughter, she was barely 14. She hadn’t started high school, and she
was walking next to her dad, yet men in their 30s and 40s were checking her out
with undisguised prurient interest. I often challenged these gawkers with a
glare; they’d look back with no evident shame, as if to say, “Yeah, you caught
me. So what?” Julia—who’s now 15, younger than any congressional page—says that
she and her friends run into this kind of leering everywhere. Men two or three
times her age approach her on the street and try to engage her in conversation.
She’s grown afraid to go running in our suburban neighborhood, because so many
men shout obscene comments out their car windows. Not one of these men, I would
venture to guess, is gay. <BR><BR>Of all the lessons being drawn from the Mark
Foley scandal, the most laughable is that this is what happens when you put gay
men in Congress. “Whether we admit it or not,” said columnist Pat Buchanan this
week, “many male homosexuals have a thing for teenage boys.” I’d restate that
sentence a bit more broadly. Whether we admit it or not, many men have a thing
for teenagers—and they no longer feel very guilty about it. Let us not forget
that when she was the same age as Foley’s page friends, Britney Spears was our
culture’s biggest sex symbol. Of the dozens of sex scandals in Washington’s
recent past, 98 percent have involved straight men and much younger women. So if
we really want a Congress free of scandal and drooling predators, it’s not gay
men we should purge from politics. We should stop electing men. <BR><BR>William
Falk<BR>Editor-in-chief</FONT></FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT size=4><FONT size=3><FONT size=4>Should you doubt the truth of the
above, discreetly station yourself in Friendship Square on a nice weekday
afternoon and observe.</FONT></FONT></FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT size=4><FONT size=3><FONT size=4><BR>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<BR><A
href="mailto:deco@moscow.com">deco@moscow.com</A><BR></FONT></DIV>
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