Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times takes us down Memory Lane to an incident that Alabama voters need to seriously consider.  You see, Democrats had no problem at all with one of their own congressmen who solicited sex from teenagers who worked as congressional pages.  Teenagers who were male, in point of fact, and if anything, it seems to have shielded him.  

Massachusetts voters stood by Democratic Rep. Gerry Studds even after he was censured by the House in 1983 for his sexual relationship at age 36 with a 17-year-old male congressional page, as well as making sexual advances toward two other teenage pages.

Far from dooming the Democratic Party, the episode barely registered at the ballot box. Democrats kept their House majority and gained Senate seats in 1984, while Studds was re-elected in his liberal Cape Cod district with 56 percent of the vote.

He won re-election five more times and was ultimately named chairman of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee before retiring in 1997. He died in 2006.

A national marine fishery was named for him in 1996, and in June, the University of Massachusetts Press published a biography, "Gerry Studds: America's First Openly Gay Congressman," which discussed the scandal as well as his achievements on domestic and foreign policy.

Rep. Studds in 1993, ten years after sexually abusing a male underage employee.  

Spare me your self-righteousness, Dems.  You honored a murderous predator as the "Lion of the Senate."  (Don't miss Jack Cashill's searing account today on these pages).  Your pompous, self-righteous posturing only condemns you as hypocrites.