Love, GOP style

The moral majority has been a thorn in the side of the GOP since the Reagan administration. It seems to have become the rule, no longer the exception, that as soon as one Republican rallies his Christian constituents with rhetoric on the sanctity of marriage and the homosexual scourge, another high-ranking GOP official across town gets caught diddling a 13 year old boy in a public restroom or groping a sleeping passenger on an airplane. Sure, the kinky sex scandal is a hallowed, time-honored tradition in American politics, traced back to the night Thomas Jefferson first donned his waistcoat and powdered wig to sneak out to the female slave quarters. And neither side of the aisle is immune. But the Republican degeneracy of the last seven years, the sheer scope and back-alley sleaziness, has so far set the bar at an historic new low.

So, why is the GOP prone to such sex scandals? Are deviants drawn to the party in a last-ditch effort to reform themselves? And how much more guilt by association can the average conservative voter bear? After all, when a 16 year old congressional page who’s just been propositioned on the House floor is placing blame, at least a portion of that blame could, in theory, be directed to the voters who put the pederast on Capitol Hill to begin with. Sure the Democrats are no strangers to scandal, but the GOP and the conservative culture to which they cater has turned the sex scandal into a form of art, a level of hypocrisy so staggering that it inspires both revulsion and awe at the same time.

“I damn sure wouldn’t want to take my kids trick or treating at Mark Foley’s house,” Wil Brown, current chairman of the Richland County Executive Committee of the S.C. Democratic party told City Paper on October 31. “The conservatives have set the standard too high for themselves to stick to it. Some of these legislators spend so much time convincing themselves they aren’t gay that they get to the point where they just can’t help themselves.”

And, since the Republicans took power in 2000, they have indeed helped themselves to plenty: to interns, House pages, high-end call girls, street corner male prostitutes, Parisian fetish clubs and unsuspecting members of the general public. And those are just the stories that made the papers. For all we know, there is a sheep breeder on the outskirts of D.C. biting his tongue and counting his money, trying desperately to shake the memory of that night the shiny black limo with government plates pulled up to his barn door. But there are a few scandals we do know about. Take Galen Fox, for example:

Galen Fox, former Hawaii House minority leader, is currently serving a three-year probation sentence for fondling a sleeping woman on a United Airlines flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles in 2004. He was also required to register as a sex offender. Having served Hawaii for nine years as a Republican state legislator, the offense cost Fox his career in politics.

The 27-year-old Asian woman was seated next to Fox en route to Las Vegas with her parents who were seated across the aisle. The woman told authorities that she took a Dramamine to calm her during the flight, covered her lap and legs with a blanket and went to sleep. While sleeping, her leg pressed against Fox, who says he took the action as a flirtatious advance. He then claimed to place his hand on her thigh. He took the sleeping woman’s lack of protest as further invitation and moved his hand under the blanket. When she finally awoke, her jeans were unbuttoned and Fox was, according to a report in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “rubbing her crotch.” She alerted flight attendants and was later moved to a different seat, while Fox pretended to sleep. When they landed at L.A.X., federal agents were waiting to nab Fox, whose political career was quickly zipped shut.

In 2004, after defeating all comers in the Illinois Republican primary, Jack Ryan seemed a worthy opponent to Democratic nominee, Barack Obama in the Senate race. Sure, the general public was turned off by the fact that he had one of his aides tail Obama and videotape everything he did in public for close to a month. Obama complained that he was filmed making private calls to his family and was even filmed on his way to the restroom on occasion. Once the media was alerted, the Ryan campaign vowed to discontinue the videotaping, shrugging it off as just part of politics. And it turned out that Ryan would soon be on the business end of the “just politics” stick.

Ryan, once dubbed the “establishment candidate,” was married to TV star, Jeri Ryan until their divorce in 1999. He ordered that his divorce records stay sealed during his 2004 run for Senate but the Los Angeles Superior Court granted access to the Chicago Tribune. The records detailed numerous trips (Ryan described them as “romantic getaways”) in 1998 to sex clubs in the U.S. and France. One club featured whips, cages and “other apparatus hanging from the ceiling,” according to Jeri’s testimony. Jeri Ryan claims that Jack asked her to have sex with him at a club in front of another couple and she refused. A few months later, he talked her into going to a club in Paris. “People were having sex everywhere,” she said. “I cried. I became physically ill.” Jeri not only left the club that night; she left the marriage. And when it went public in 2004, Jack Ryan left the Senate race.

Jim West, served the Washington state senate from 1986 to 2002 and later became mayor of Spokane. Aside from proposing legislation to make sexual activity by persons under the age of 18 illegal, he also supported bills that would disallow gays and lesbians to work in schools. Oh, and was accused of molesting two boys when he was a Boy Scout leader and Spokane County sheriff’s deputy back in the 1970s. Those charges were never substantiated, but his online gay tryst at Web site Gay.com with an undercover reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review was harder to dismiss. According to one report, West offered the reporter, who West believed was an 18 year old boy, “gifts, favors, and a city hall internship.” West dismissed the chats as simple “role playing” and that the “anonymity element” of the Internet allowed him to get carried away. West was removed from office in 2005 and died of colon cancer the following year.

On the lighter side of scandal, if anyone knows the best way to drive away from a police stop with your Johnson hanging out of your pants and a methadone-addicted prostitute in the passenger seat, please let U.S. Congressman Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) know. In 1993 Calvert, named one of the “20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress” by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was roused from a “talk” with a known prostitute in his parked car by police cruiser headlights and an officer tapping on his driver side window. In his report the Corona, Calif. officer described that the woman had her head “laying in the driver’s lap.” “I noticed,” the report continues, “that the male subject was placing his penis into his unzipped dress slacks and was trying to hide it with his untucked dress shirt.” Calvert, unable cover himself, simply put the car in gear and attempted to flee the scene. The cop eventually got the congressman to pull over and stop the vehicle. No serious charges were ever filed and congressman Calvert continues to serve to this day. Curiously, when the GOP pushed for Clinton’s impeachment over oral sex, guess which California congressman voted for impeachment?

As far as Bush-era sex scandals go, Mark Foley’s truly sets the bar for hypocrite conservative pederasts everywhere. In September 2006, Foley, at the time chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, resigned after years of perverse emails and text messages to teenaged congressional male pages came to light. Foley is believed to have entered into sexual relationships with at least two pages after they left the program.

Prior to the scandal, Foley worked to establish a national sex offender database and it remains to be seen if he’ll be able to keep his own name out of it. According to reports, Foley invited one 17-year-old page to stay at his house in exchange for oral sex and asked another to email a photo his genitalia. “[I]m still 17 till feb 23,” one teen revealed to the Congressman via text message. Foley’s reply: “see you feb 24th.” And in April 2003, it was discovered that Foley engaged in cybersex with an 18-year-old former page while on the floor of Congress, as the House voted on an Iraq War appropriations bill.

Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), then Speaker of the House, was forced to step down after it was revealed that many on Capitol Hill knew of Foley’s predilection for teen boys but took no action, in essence giving their blessing to that behavior. The GOP lost control of Congress in 2006 and many believe the Foley scandal was a direct contributor. Meanwhile, the boys in the House page program are undoubtedly breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Lucky for Missouri state house pages, Republican Andrew Buhr, lost his bid for a state senate seat in 2000. In 2002 President Bush appointed Buhr, still a rising player in the Missouri GOP, to the Committee on Presidential Scholars. A month later, Buhr was forced to resign after criminal sodomy charges were filed against him, stemming from a 2001 sexual encounter in a public school bathroom with a 13 year old boy.

Illicit gay bathroom sex is nothing new to Republican legislators. Just ask Idaho Senator, Larry Craig. Last June, Craig was charged with lewd conduct after being caught in police sting operation in a Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport men’s room, allegedly cruising for gay sex. Craig initially plead guilty to the charge, but later motioned to reverse his plea. The court denied the motion last month. Despite being asked to resign from the senate, Craig says he will finish out his term. After the story went public, a man in Craig’s home state accused the senator of cruising him in a sporting goods store. Craig responded to the charges in an interview with the Idaho Statesman. “I don’t go around anywhere hitting on men,” he said. “And by God, if I did, I wouldn’t do it in Boise, Idaho! Jiminy!”

Jiminy, indeed. That’s probably what David Vitter (R-La.) was thinking when Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the madam of a Washington, D.C. escort service, released her phone records to the media in 2006. Vitter a proponent of abstinence-only sex education who once called marriage “the most important social institution in human history” contacted the escort service five times between 1999 and 2001, while his wife and children were back at home. Two calls were placed during actual House roll call votes. Last summer, an escort service in New Orleans alleged that Vitter was a regular customer in the 1990s. Last September, according to the Times-Picayune the New Orleans prostitute who made the allegations against Vitter passed a polygraph test related to her relationship with the senator.

The list of recent scandals goes on: Randall “Duke” Cunningham the former Republican congressman from California and Vietnam War flying ace, who recently pled guilty to accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars (and a couple of prostitutes) in bribes. There’s Larry Jack Schwarz, the former Republican legislator from Colorado, who allegedly molested his stepdaughter, was found in possession of a large cache of kiddie porn and who, after leaving politics, moved to California to work for hardcore porno outfit, Platinum X Pictures. The company also employs his biological daughter, porn actress, Jewel De Nyle, star of “Pink Hotel on Butt Row,” “Face Down, Ass Up 2,” “Sodomania Slop Shots 10,” and most recently “The Black Bastard 12.” Or how about the Puerto Rican Republican congressman Edison Misla Aldorando who was convicted of serving alcohol to his daughter and her 17 year old friend, before tossing back a few of his own and then trying to rape the friend. He got 13 years for that and another 10 for fondling his daughter.

Can it get any worse for the GOP? Sure, many Republicans of the Bush-era have either been led out of office in shackles or forced to pack up their butt plugs and slink out the back door, but at some point the bad apples should eventually be weeded out. Or are there just that many bad apples? It remains to be seen. In the coming year, chances are the party will try to reign in the child molesters and sodomites (or at least the ones they know about), shorten their leashes until after the presidential elections in 2008 and certainly–

Wait, hold the phone! Fresh off the AP wire: only two days ago, Richard Curtis a Republican lawmaker in Washington state resigned just days after a police report surfaced stating that a male prostitute took the legislator’s wallet after they had sex in a Spokane, Wash. hotel room. Curtis, who voted against gay rights legislation, was attending a GOP retreat in Spokane and met the male prostitute at an erotic video store, according to the police report. The prostitute, Cody Castagna, claims that Curtis reneged on the $1000 he initially agreed to pay him for the man-sex and intended to hold the legislator’s wallet until he was paid. Curtis claims that Castagna originally agreed to $200—admittedly a fairer price for a guy picked up in an x-rated video store—but then changed his mind and threatened to expose Curtis’s gay lifestyle to his wife in an attempt to extort him. The legislator’s countermove: he went to the police, filed a report on the public record and thus exposed his gay lifestyle to the entire nation. Doubtless, he’s wishing for a do-over on that one.

Well, it looks like we’re in for another wild year. Lock up your young sons, conservative America. …Or at least instruct them to get payment in advance.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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