Foley goes Straight

You already know that former congressman Mark Foley was a closeted gay within the gay-unfriendly Republican party. You know about his fixation on underaged pages. You probably also know about Foley's ties to Scientology, a cult founded by a man who declared that all homosexuals should be quarantined.

But you may not know that Foley has an even deeper connection with another cult notorious for its abuse of young people: Mel Sembler's Straight -- a network of alleged "anti-drug clinics" fashioned after the notorious SEED program, which was shut down in the 1970s.

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Sembler is close to the Bush family, and seems to have thrived on his connections to high-level Republicans. W named Sembler the ambassador to Italy (despite his lack of qualifications for the task), in which capacity he is rumored to have had some involvement with the Niger forgeries.

In 1993, Straight received dismal publicity concerning its abusive treatment of young people. At that time, published reports revealed that kids were beaten and bashed against walls, while others were forced to sit wallow in menstrual blood, urine and feces. Youngsters enrolled with the program were forbidden to have any unsupervised communication with their parents.

Straight did not really cease; it merely changed its name to the Drug Free America Foundation. Some clinics use other names.

My earlier stories on Straight are here and here. The best exposes of the cult are by Jeff Gorenfeld and Wes Fager.

The links between these groups and the Republican party are mysterious but undeniable. Mark Foley -- who claims to be the victim of child abuse -- continuously associated himself with a Straight offshoot called Growing Together, located in Lake Worth, Florida.

New Times reporter Trevor Aaronson conducted a superb investigation on Growing Together. Here are a few glimpses:

The children also claimed staff had beaten and physically restrained them, Butler says. She even met one young girl who claimed a therapist had broken her arm. Other kids asserted that the building was always filthy. Growing Together administrators admitted to Butler (and later in court documents) that the facility had rats and that several urinals had been backed up for days at a time.

In March 2000, Butler and her ex-husband, Stephen, who shared custody, removed John from the program. Stephen Butler was moving to Arkansas and wanted to take the boy. Once free, John told his mother that he had suffered a sprained wrist at Growing Together when a therapist slammed him down on a table.

And...

A female client complained that she had severe cramping and bleeding. Staff did not refer her to a medical doctor. Only days later, when her mother became aware of the condition, did she see a physician. The girl was pregnant and miscarried.

More:

"I still can't get the screams out of my head from hearing kids dragged down the hall by the hair on their heads," says a former graduate of the program who asked to remain anonymous. "The crimes that were committed there have never been told in public. Nobody has ever put these people on trial."

Rik Pavlescak, a former investigator with the Department of Children and Families (DCF), wrote reports on the program in the early '90s that detailed beatings, restraint, imprisonment, and systematic humiliation. He alleges that influential outsiders have undermined investigations of the group.

Among those influential outsiders was Mark Foley. From Wes Fager's site (with paragraph breaks added for readability):

Former Republican Congressman and gay, alleged pedophile Mark Foley, formerly co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, once wrote to Charlie Crist and Jeb Bush to close down a nudist beach in Pasco County, Florida because 11 year old children participated. He ran on a ticket to protect children from sexual abuse and introduced legislation to stop child porn.

Growing Together is a second generation Straight which operated, until recently, in Lake Worth, Florida. In 1990 Florida state health officials claimed that GT turned its patients into "virtual prisoners" while Florida Judge Michael Gersten said of a girl's treatment in it "smacks of abuse." [Sun Sentinel, 3-9-90]. Yet Mark Foley endorsed it.

There have been patient riots at GT just as there were at Straight. Yet Mark Foley endorsed it.

In 1997 theStraights published a police report about the sexual assault of a boy at a Growing Together host home. Two boys restrained a third as a fourth tried to put his cock in the teenager's mouth. But the boy resisted. One boy masturbated in his hair. Yet Congressman Foley continued to endorse the program.

In 2004 News Times did an expose on Growing Together, yet Mark Foley did not remove his endorsement.

Growing Together and the other Straight offshoots have received much bad publicity -- as has Scientology. Yet Foley continued to lend his then-good name to both. Why?