Bill Maher and the Pedophile Panic

Bill Maher is a little politically pervy, and that’s a characteristic component of his schtick; the reason I try to catch his HBO show as often as poss. But I was disappointed to hear him to assert that the congressional pages in the Mark Foley matter were far from innocent because they seemed to have flirted back. I 'd like to point out that there’s obviously some curious boundary-testing and/or counterfeiting when a hormonal teenager (who lest we forget, is still a legal minor) is placed in the company of an aggressively flirtatious and powerful employer. I wouldn’t let that distract from, or outright excuse, Foley’s transgression.

However, Bill's essay in Salon.com cracked me up, despite all my earnest child advocacy. But when I tried to share the hilarity, my friends mostly thought it disgusting and abhorrent. Even Big A, instead of being relieved that for the first time in weeks I was quoting something funny that didn’t begin with “Russell Peters said…,” turned to fully face me *in the car* and said sternly, “that’s just not funny.”

I’ll give you a little taste so you can judge. (You can also read it on Salon.com--although, if you’re not a member you’ll need to watch a brief ad to access the article.)

Oct. 13, 2006 | If you think the worst thing Congress doesn't protect young people from is Mark Foley, wake up and smell the burning planet. The ice caps are cracking, the coral reefs are bleaching, and we're losing two species an hour. The birds have bird flu, the cows have mad cow, and our poisoned groundwater has turned spinach into a side dish of mass destruction. Our schools are shooting galleries, our beaches are cancer wards, and under George W. Bush -- for the first time in 45 years -- our country's infant mortality rate actually went up.

Read the labels on your food. It turns out the healthiest thing you can put in your body is Mark Foley's penis. He was probably the first fruit those pages ever came into contact with that wasn't drenched in pesticide.

But that's America for you -- a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street. And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting our children for death. They're called military recruiters.

Why aren't Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we're supposed to be fighting for over there and what the plan is. Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penises were -- but at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions. We're the predators. Because we have an entire economy built on asking young people what they want, making the cheapest, sleaziest form of it they'll accept, and selling it to them until they choke on it and die.

You know who's grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, by convincing you they're depressed, hyperactive or suffering from attention-deficit disorder and so they must all get medicated. The drug dealers hooking your kids aren't in South America, they're in the halls of Congress handing out campaign donations to your congressmen. Mark Foley says he never slept with those kids, and I believe him, because American children are so hopped up on pills I doubt any of them could get it up.

Yes, i’ve previously weighed in strongly against pedophiles in these pages (and no, that’s not a rip-off dig against Foley), especially in that post about James Kincaid. But to put things in balance, I’d also like to reference Judith Levine’s 2003 work, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, especially the chapter called "The Pedophile Panic" where like Bill M., she argues that we focus on pedophilia at the expense of a host of other, often more serious, problems that beset our children.


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