Rhea Saran: The half-hour PBS Religion & Ethics Newsweekly program that airs on Saturday morning was fairly predictable in its contents on October 7th. First was an update on the Amish school shootings. And then, of course, was the Mark Foley scandal. The question is: why is a political sex scandal so high in the line-up for a religion and ethics program?

The answer seems obvious. On October 4th, newspapers– among them, The New York Times – reported that Representative Mark Foley alleged that he was molested by a clergyman when he was 13 through 15 years old. And then there was that other little confession: Foley is, as was suspected, gay. Throw in a molesting clergyman, a closeted politician and underage victims, and it’s surprising the Foley scandal didn’t actually headline the PBS show.

But what is particularly interesting about this story as well as that of the Amish school tragedy is how quickly God was pulled into these earthly, human acts. The unidentified clergyman is Foley’s way of invoking God. And Charles Carl Roberts IV, a.k.a., the Amish school gunman, was upset with God for allowing his 20-day-old daughter to die nine years ago.

While hiding behind the excuse “this is somehow all much bigger than I am” might be understandable in the Roberts case (he could have been emotionally and mentally destabilized by the tragedy of losing a child), in Foley’s case, it seems a purely political move. Consider this: Mark Foley is, allegedly, a gay Republican sexual predator. Being gay and behaving in an immoral manner will immediately be connected by the religious right. Both preying on children and being gay defies any focus on returning to “family values.” After all, Christian conservatives – and the Republican Party – want to keep children “safe” from all contact with homosexuals. And they thought that was part of Foley’s value system, too. Until now.

So, really, Foley had very little choice. Rather than wait to be painted as a plague on all the party stands for, he quickly turned the tables. It was you, he says to horrified Christians. It was, he insinuates, the Roman Catholic Church that corrupted his values. (The Times article quotes his lawyer as saying, “I cannot comment on whether the clergyman was a priest, a minister, an imam or a rabbi.” Sure, it could certainly have been an imam. Or, wait, maybe it was a Hindu pundit?)

The confession plays an even bigger role than preserving Foley’s dubious public image. According to the Washington Post, a new Pew Research Center poll has shown a 21-point drop in the number of white evangelicals who are likely to vote for the Republican Party in the upcoming elections. This was before the Foley scandal broke. Chances are many evangelicals will distance themselves further from the party with the new developments. So, naturally the press is agog, waiting to see whether this political scandal will have religious repercussions.

The media stories about both the Amish shooting as well as the Foley scandal suggest – in tone and emphasis – that the press, even while throwing religion out there, don’t really buy that excuse. Reportage of Roberts’ crime puts his confession of having molested before high in the reader’s mind, while the tidbit about his dead daughter is buried far into the stories. The Times’ coverage of the Foley confessional was rife with seemingly silly quotes – like the one about the clergyman’s religious affiliations.

So, why bring religion into it at all? The one other similar aspect of both stories is that both crimes were committed against children. Perhaps we need to believe that there’s this inexplicable “bigger factor” in play that coerces fellow human beings into abusing the most innocent of innocents, even when it seems unlikely that the explanation is anything “bigger” than a disturbed mind or negative socialization.

Rhea Saran is a graduate student at New York University.