In the movie Half-Baked, Dave Chapelle's character goes to a drug rehab meeting and is booed off the stage when it is discovered that his only addiction is to marijuana. He had been incovenienced by the drugs, but others there had their lives ruined by much more addictive stuff.

I came a tentative conclusion that is bound to be unpopular as I haven't yet heard anyone reputable state it aloud.

Like most political nerds (and some with actual lives) I was paying really close attention to the whole Mark Foley mess. For those of you that are unaware, Foley is a conservative Republican congressman that apparently gets his jollies by flirting with 16 year old male congressional pages.

It seemed like a pretty cut-and-dry case. Foley was caught red-handed, didn't deny having done it, quit congress, confessed to having been sexually abused earlier in his life, admitted that he is gay, and has checked himself in to rehab. All within a couple of days!

Some, however, didn't want to stop there. Democrats wanted to use this pan to fry bigger fish and went after Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and others that are accused of having known about it. Many Republicans agree. At the moment, it appears that the Republican leadership heard mutterings about Foley's peculiarities and were aware of some of the earlier, less weird, correspondences between Foley and young pages. Hastert and Majority Leader Boehner were not helped by the inconsistency of their statements.

Here's the realization I came to today:all of the hysterics surrounding the entire issue are built upon the premise that a 16 year old kid, protected by a computer monitor, is utterly helpless in the face of power.

Note the language being used. A word that I am seeing brandied about is "predator." A predator is an animal that eats its prey. Or it's a person that plunders, pillages, or obliterates. Whatever a predator is done with will never be the same again. Mark Foley would be a predator if he physically raped or psychologically tormented the young men, but not simply because he grossed them out.

And then there's the word "pedophile," which carried a certain weight to it. A pedophile is one that "loves children". Children. To date, the youngest victim is 16. That's not an adult, but it's not a child, either. We do society a great disservice to futher infantize young adults. The longer we treat young people like children the longer they will act like children. Adolescence already spans into the mid-twenties for a lot of people. They need to be expected to take control of the situations they find themselves in to a much greater degree than we expect them to now.

And lastly, just about everything I've heard that he's done has been behind the safety of a computer monitor and involved kids that were quite a distance away. If all he's done is produceable in IMs and emails, then he really hasn't done that much. Whatever meetings he might have arranged were quite consensual. That's not to say that it's all okay, but to attach the same level of condemnation to this that one would attach to a serial rapist or child molester does a disservice to the genuinely raped and molested.

I should state that it's possible that we are (or at least I am) fully unaware of the worst of Foley's transgressions. If he's guilty of something more then my argument is undercut. But most of what I've heard thus far involves being a crappy congressman and a sick man, but not a predatory monster.