Eugene Robinson’s column operates on two absurd assumptions, other than that it’s perfectly reasonable. The first is the idea that the GOP base wouldn’t go batty over similar behavior from Foley if he’d been cyber-stalking girls. I find that simply unbelievable. Robinson concedes that it would still be a scandal, but his aim is to claim that this whole brouhaha is grounded in GOP homophobia, so he has to claim that the results would be very different if these were female pages (Note to Robinson: Monica wasn’t a dude, last I heard). Which brings us to point number 2: Robinson seems to imagine that we live in a world where “anti-gay” attitudes were invented by the GOP. He says that “in perfect world” homosexuality wouldn’t be a big factor in the scandal. But because of two thing — GOP gay bashing and GOP hypocrisy — we don’t live in a perfect world. Now, a liberal could argue that the GOP is one of the last insitutions to remain “anti-gay” and that would be a more difficult proposition to argue with, depending on your definition of anti-gay. But at least that would at least get the timeline right. But the insinuation that the GOP created unease with homosexuality flies in the face of, well, nearly everything an educated person knows about the last couple thousand years.