Male members of Congress and “young men” have never been good optics.
How young are we talking?
Anyone remember Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.)? He helped solidify the fact by more than befriending an underage male page back in 2006. In a scandal that rocked the Capitol and shocked the hell out of the reporters who covered him, he had sent explicit text pages to the 16-year-old page. And soon enough he was hightailing his overly friendly ass back to Florida, where finally came out the closet as gay.
That same year, Foley finally came clean about his longtime male partner of 22 years. In 2012, Layne Nisenbaum died while awaiting a liver transplant.
Foley isn’t the only lawmaker to make anything connection between lawmakers and young males a taboo subject. In 1983, Rep. Daniel Crane (R-lll.) and Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) got in hot water for “sexual misconduct” with House pages. The House censured them both.
But this story isn’t anything like that. In fact, this involves a simple, innocent tweet that went terribly wrong.
The expanded Instagram post from Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) isn’t damning at all. It’s actually sort of touching that a senator would think to call up young people to let them know they’ve received appointments to service academies.
But that tweet? Yeah, it’s been deleted.
The Instagram Post
The new, more innocuous tweet
Gardner, 40, is married to his wife, Jamie, and has two children.
Isn’t being a member of Congress fun?