My question for the Republicans: If you think the Democrats are "playing politics" with the Congressional page sex scandal by trying to force the resignation of the Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, will you agree that Republicans were "playing politics" with their impeachment of the President of the United States in a sex-related scandal.?

Each of these questions addresses an orthodoxy, of sorts. Do Catholics truly believe a baby is denied admittance to heaven for the want of a brief ceremony involving a sprinkling of water and the sign of the cross and the words, "I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen." This is a core belief of Catholicism that many Catholics haven't given a second thought to, and wouldn't be thinking about today if the Pope Benedict XVI hadn't made front page news by urging church scholars to reconsider the church's position on a place called limbo -- that heavenly Green Room where the souls of unbaptized babies and good pagan people like Mahatma Gandhi await admittance to the other side of the beatific velvet rope.

When I was a Catholic grade school student we used to raise money to "buy pagan babies" in Asian countries for five dollars apiece. For that price a child in Philadelphia could "ransom" some poor unbaptized child in China or Vietnam, who would then be baptized by missionaries and given Christian names, like Joseph or Mary. There's a theory that these resentful pagan babies grew up to become Vietcong.

Do Republicans truly believe in their heart-of-hearts that the Constitutional crisis created by an "Oval Office b.j.," as Rush Limbaugh described it last week, was born of genuine moral outrage rather than partisan political opportunity? Soulless conservative poster girl Ann Coulter sounded like an hysterical harridan on the Sean Hannity talkradio show Friday afternoon, describing the political fallout following the Mark Foley/page boy scandal as "the Clinton war on gays." I kid you not.

If you listen to the exquisite convolutions of the logic being employed by Waffen SS Republicans to blame Democrats for "not" outing Foley's scummy frolic on the internet with underage boys, you can only stare at them with slack-jawed wonder. Are these the same guys who "leaked' the DNA sample on the blue dress in Linda Tripp's closet? GOPegro, Please! Let us be clear, we have established what you are, Madame Republican and Madame Democrat, now we are merely haggling over price.

Comparing Catholic conservatives with Republican conservatives is unfair. It would be unfair to link Foley's creepy boytoy internet behavior while a congressman with his allegation that he was molested by (presumably) a Catholic priest as a child. But it isn't unfair to ask the question at the heart of this post-Foley resignation. It is a question made famous by a revered moderate Republican Senator during an earlier Constitutional crisis: "What did the president know? And when did he know it?"

We already know part of the answer in the case of Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. The fair question now is: "When did the speaker know? And what did the speaker do about it?"