Something interesting has been brought to my attention. The Blogactive site has posted a version of The List--or a list. It contains the names of members of Congress, Bush aides, celebrities and others in addition to Capitol Hill staffers. It claims that Kirk Fordham, Mark Foley's previous chief of staff, is gay. I certainly don't know whether that's true or not. But assume for a moment it is. Fordham yesterday told various reporters that he had warned Speaker Denny Hastert's office about his boss sometime in the 2002 to 2004 period. What's intriguing about this is that after House Republicans had started suggesting that the gay GOP staffers--sometimes called by Washington wags the Velvet Mafia or the Lavender Bund--were somehow to blame for the party's Foley-oriented woes, a staffer who might be a member of this under-fire group fired back, essentially saying, Hey, we warned Hastert about Foley years ago, and he did nothing. So there!
I'm just speculating here--and know nothing about Fordham's particulars. In any event--for whatever the reason--Fordham has made life rougher for Hastert and the leaders. Meanwhile, a source writes:
The fact that some of the GOP gay guys are worried about a right-wing backlash against them is very telling. Their existence in all of these Hill offices would certainly explain (to the right-wingers) the total lack of legislative progress on most of the Christian/social conservative issues. I'd be pissed if I had a social conservative agenda that hadn't been addressed and suddenly it became clear, like now, who might have been subtly blocking it.
That's another dimension that had not occurred to me--and another reason to wonder how messy this might get.
Posted by David Corn at October 5, 2006 12:27 PM
