Sex Scandals to Learn By

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

Let’s consider the story of Representative Eric Massa, a freshman Democrat from upstate New York who made headlines recently when he resigned from office amid talk about sexual harassment of male staffers.

Massa’s defense was that the questionable conduct was boisterous horseplay by an old ex-Navy officer and five of his single male aides, who roomed together in one small Washington townhouse. “Not only did I grope him,” he said of one of his roommates, “I tickled him until he couldn’t breathe and four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday, and it was: ‘Kill the old guy.’ ”

Already we have extracted our first important lesson from this scandal, which is that voters are going to have to pay more attention to where their elected officials bunk while they’re in the nation’s capital. Remember that last year we had the Prayer House, a much larger and nicer townhouse full of conservative Christian congressmen? They were supposed to be engaged in discussions of the Bible, but, in fact, seemed to spend most of their time trying to bail each other out of adultery crises.

The extremely overworked House ethics committee is looking into charges that the Democratic leadership should have done something about Massa sooner. It might have been a warning signal when he told a reporter that rather than pay substantial salaries to a handful of aides like most members do, he preferred to hire lots and lots of people who made so little that several of them were forced to economize by living with their boss.

(More here.)