It's Thursday, April 16, 2006.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

I want to start out with some recent headlines that have caught the attention of Americans, a bipartisan story.

And so just in the last several days, two members of Congress

had had to resign over sex scandals. And that includes Eric Swalwell, who resigned as a Democrat

from a congressional seat in California, even as he dropped out as a leading contender for the

Democratic gubernatorial nomination there in California.

Everything just fell apart for him in a matter of hours, certainly in a matter of days.

He eventually had to not only drop out of the California governor's race, he also had to just resign from the House.

And more on that in just a moment.

But you also had Representative Tony Gonzalez of Texas, a Republican

who also had to resign from the House rather than face discipline and the expulsion process.

And in this case, it was because he also had been involved in sexual misbehavior.

In the case of Eric Swalwell, I still have to use the legal definition that he is accused of having participated in sexual misbehaviors,

even as sexual crimes. When it comes to Representative Gonzalez, now former Representative

Gonzalez, the Texas Republican, it was about sexual misbehavior with a former staffer

who later committed suicide. So we really are talking about very dark situations.

In the case of Representative Swalwell, the interesting thing over the last several days has been that additional accusers have come forward.

And you'll notice there's a word that is used by many in the media about these serious accusations, you'll hear the term credible put in front

of either accusation or accuser. This is a credible accuser. It's a credible accusation. I've had

several people ask, what does credible mean here? Well, at one level, credible means believable.

There's credence to this claim. It doesn't mean that it's absolutely true.

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