It was bound to happen. For the editors at the Wall Street Journal (weren't they once actually worth reading?), the problem is that all gays are potential predators of teens, and that gay congressmen should be barred from interaction with pages. Money quote:
In today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one? ...
Yes, Mr. Hastert and his staff should have done more to quarantine Mr. Foley from male pages after the first email came to light. But if that's the standard, we should all admit we are returning to a rule of conduct that our cultural elite long ago abandoned as intolerant.
Huh? I had no idea that the "cultural elite" was now in favor of older, powerful men exploiting younger, powerless men in their teens for sexual titillation. In fact, the cultural elite is far more sensitive to that kind of sexual abuse than it was in the past. No one would regard it as intolerant to bar a person with such a predilection from interacting with teens past the legal age of consent. They might, however, consider it intolerant to accuse all gay men of such behavior and seeking to smear and "quarantine" them. In fact, they'd consider it a form of bigotry. Which is what the Wall Street Journal's editorial page is all about now, when it isn't endorsing torture. (Rich Lowry, natch, hypes the smear.)