The entire Foley scandal has removed the cover from a party has serious skeletons. Far more disturbing is the downplaying of the incident by others in the Republican Party, all the way up to the White House.

• Today Tony Snow, while discussing the incident with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, referred to the emails as simply “naughty”. Think Progress has the video on that and AmericaBlog has more.
• Snow also told ABC News that even if the leaders knew, the White House would not call for an investigation into a possible cover-up. Further more, White House Dan Bartlett doesn’t even feel there should be an independent investigation into a possible cover-up.
• Josh Marshall has pointed out that the statement by Dennis Hastert, calling for an investigation, is not really what it appears to be. It turns out Hastert would rather go after the media, who broke this story, than his own party who has tried to cover this story up for years.

A United States Congressman has had conversations with a 16 year old boy. In those conversations, he tells him he is “hot”. He also engages in other conversations with young Congressional Pages and asks them such lude things as their masturbation habits. In once instance, Foley asked the young page “how big” he was, referring to his penis, and after the page told Foley he was under 18 and wanted to wait until he was 18. Think about that for a minute. A minor in the United States is being solicited by a United States Congressman, tries to turn down the sexual tone of the conversation by saying he is under 18 and wants to wait. This Republican, a member of the “party of values”, does not say something like “I understand and respect your wishes”. Instead this pervert goes on to ask the child how large his penis is!

The ball is now in the court of the Republican base – the religious right. Considering the recent memories of the Priest sex scandal, how will they respond to the Foley story? Will they try to downplay the perversions of this incident in order to save political face? Will they go against the preaching’s of God because the person who did this is a Republican? Or will they respond with the vigilance that should follow and condemn not only the actions of Mark Foley, who has apparent psychological problems, but also demand that the leaders within their party come clean on the cover up?

Justice on this now lies in the hand of the voters, and the religious right accounts for a large number of those voters. They need to make their position heard on this. They might try to keep it quiet, but their higher power knows what is happening.