Republican "family values" honor roll
George Allen, Senator: Divorced twice
Dick Armey, Former House Majority Leader: Divorced
Bob Barr, Congressman and author of the Defense of Marriage Act: Divorced twice
Neil Bush: Divorced, has admitted sleeping with prostitutes
Vice President Dick Cheney and erstwile lesbian writer Lynne Cheney have a lesbian daughter: Mary Cheney.
Helen Chenoweth-Hage, Former Congresswoman: Divorced, and dated a married man between her own marriages
Alfonse D'Amato, former Senator: Catholic but divorced
Bob Dole, Former Senator: Divorced the mother of his only child, later served as spokesman for Viagra.
Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House: Divorced twice, and has a lesbian sister: Candace Gingrich.
Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York: Catholic but divorced twice, committed adultery openly, and his first wife was his seconf cousin
Phil Gramm, Senator: Divorced
Henry Hyde, Congressman: Had a long affair with a married woman while he was married.
Alan Keyes, former ambassador and Republican U.S. Senate candidate, has a lesbian daughter: Maya Marcel-Keyes.
Henry Kissinger, Former Secretary of State: Divorced, flamboyant philanderer, mass murderer
William "Pete" Knight, Senator and longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, has a gay son: David Knight.
Rush Limbaugh, conservative pundit: Divorced three times, addicted to prescription painkillers
John McCain, Senator: Divorced
Ronald Reagan, Former President: Divorced. His second wife, Nancy Reagan, gave birth seven months after they were married.
Phyllis Schlafly, conservative columnist: Has a gay son: John Schlafly.
Randall Terry, Operation Rescue founder and anti-gay activist, has a gay son: Jamiel Terry.
Strom Thurmond, former Senator: When he was 23, fathered an illigitimate child via his family's black maid, who was 15 years old at the time.
John Warner, Senator: Divorced twice
William Weld, former Governor of Massachusetts: Catholic but divorced, began dating his eventual second wife whil still married to his first wife, the mother of his five children
George Will, bow-tie-wearing conservative columnist: Divorced
Pete Wilson, Former Governor of California: Divorced
Just how gay are Republicans?
by Frank Rich, The New York Times
The screen's first official gay bar," as it was labeled by the film historian Vito Russo, appeared in the 1962 political potboiler Advise and Consent. Its most prominent visitor was a conservative United States senator.
As sheer coincidence would have it, Otto Preminger's adaptation of Allen Drury's best seller about a brutal confirmation fight was released on a sparkling new DVD last week just as the John Bolton nomination was coming to its committee vote. Like Hollywood's other riveting political movie of 1962, The Manchurian Candidate, Advise and Consent is fallout from the McCarthy era: the controversial nominee for secretary of state (Henry Fonda, who else?) is a stand-in for Alger Hiss. But it may be in even less need of a remake: the intervening four decades have cast this film in a highly contemporary light.
By all rights Advise and Consent should be terribly dated. The cold war is now so over that the American and Russian presidents are bonding in Red Square. The film's Kennedy-era ambience -- both a J.F.K. brother-in-law (Peter Lawford) and former lover (Gene Tierney) are in the cast -- seems as retro as the Hula-Hoop. But when the pivotal gay plot twist kicks in, Advise and Consent taps into unfinished business that roils the capital as much, if not more, today than it did then.
In 2005, homosexuality is no longer the love that dare not speak its name (the word is never mentioned in the movie), but as Washington fights its nuclear war over the judiciary, it is the ticking time bomb within the conservative movement that no one can defuse.
In Advise and Consent, the handsome young senator with a gay secret (Don Murray) is from Utah -- a striking antecedent of the closeted conservative Mormon lawyer in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. For a public official to be identified as gay in the Washington of the 50's and 60's meant not only career suicide but also potentially actual suicide.
Yet Drury, a staunchly anti-Communist conservative of his time, regarded the character as sympathetic, not a villain. The senator's gay affair, he wrote, was "purely personal and harmed no one else." As the historian David K. Johnson observes in The Lavender Scare, his 2004 account of Washington's anti-gay witch hunts during the cold war era, it's the gay-baiters in Drury's novel who "are the unprincipled menace to the country, using every available tool for partisan advantage." Preminger's movie takes the same stand (though the preposterously stereotyped gay bar scene is the film's own invention).
That message remains on target now. But in the years since, even as it has ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay, unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement. It's a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-"activist" judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they're for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that Advise and Consent so powerfully extols.
Today's judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn't homosexuality per se that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the courts. That's a sham. These people have been attacking gay people since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, characterizes the religious right's anti-gay campaign as a 30-year war, dating back to the late 1970's, when the Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant championed the overturning of an anti-discrimination law protecting gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla., and the Rev. Jerry Falwell's newly formed Moral Majority issued a "Declaration of War" against homosexuality.
A quarter-century later these views remained so unreconstructed that Mr. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson would go so far as to pin the 9/11 attacks in part on gay men and lesbians -- a charge they later withdrew but that Mr. Robertson repositioned just two weeks ago. In response to a question from George Stephanopoulos, he said he now believes that activist judges are a more serious threat than Al Qaeda. [Robertson later called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, then lied and apologized about it.]
[Rev Robertson also fathered his eldest child out of wedlock.]
Their cronies are no different. As The Washington Post reported, Rick Scarborough, the Texas preacher and Tom DeLay acolyte whose "Patriot Pastor" network is a leading player in the judiciary battle, first became active in politics in 1992, when he helped oust a local high-school principal for the crime of presiding over an AIDS-awareness assembly.
The American Family Association, whose leader, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, is a Scarborough ally, had been whipping up homophobia long before anyone suspected SpongeBob SquarePants of being a stalking horse (or at least a stalking sea sponge) for same-sex marriage. So-called research available on the Wildmon Web site for years -- and still there as of last week -- asserts that 17 percent of gay men "report eating and/or rubbing themselves with the feces of their partners" and 15 percent "report sex with animals."
Which judges do these people admire? Their patron saint is the former Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore, best known for his activism in displaying the Ten Commandments; in a ruling against a lesbian mother in a custody case, Mr. Moore deemed homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature" and suggested that the state had the power to prohibit homosexual "conduct" with penalties including "confinement and even execution."
Another hero is William H. Pryor Jr., the former Alabama attorney general whose nomination to the federal bench was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. A Pryor brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Texas anti-sodomy law argued that decriminalized gay sex would lead to legalized necrophilia, bestiality and child pornography. It was Justice Anthony Kennedy's eloquent dismissal of such vitriol in his 2003 majority opinion striking down the Texas statute that has since made him the right's No. 1 judicial piñata.
What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war.
Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, "Our nation's moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians)." (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.)
The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995.
But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West's long, successful political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education. The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy Cohn of Angels in America -- who describes himself as "a heterosexual man" who has sex "with guys" -- Mr. West has said he had "relations with adult men" but doesn't "characterize" himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy -- it's pathology.
Allen Drury might not have known what to make of Mr. West or of another odd tic in the 30-year war, the recurrent emergence of gay-baiting ideologues with openly gay children (Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Alan Keyes). According to Mr. Johnson's fresh scholarship in The Lavender Scare, a likely inspiration for the gay plot line in Drury's Advise and Consent was the real-life story of a Wyoming Democrat, Lester Hunt, who shot himself in his Senate office in 1954 after the Republican Campaign Committee threatened to make an issue of his gay son's arrest in Lafayette Park on "morals charges."
Those were the dark ages, but it isn't entirely progress that we now have a wider war on gay people, thinly disguised as a debate over the filibuster, cloaked in religion, and counting among its shock troops politicians as utterly bereft of moral bearings as James West. Check out the good old days in Advise and Consent, not to mention Charles Laughton's valedictory performance as a Bible Belt senator who ultimately puts patriotism over partisanship, and weep.
As originally published
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Latest Republican hypocrite: Larry Craig
Randal David Ankeney
George Allen
Dick Armey
Bob Barr
Robert Bauman
Louis Beres
Anita Bryant
John Burt
Neil Bush
Dick Cheney
Mary Cheney
Helen Chenoweth-Hage
John Cornyn
Carey Lee Cramer
Larry Craig
Dan Crane
Randy "Duke" Cunningham
Alfonse D'Amato
Tom DeLay
Richard Delgaudio
James Dobson
Bob Dole
David Dreier
Jerry Falwell
Arthur Finkelstein
Mark Foley
Jeff Gannon
Candace Gingrich
Newt Gingrich
Philip Giordano
Rudy Giuliani
Phil Gramm
Mark Grethen
Jim Guckert
Dan Gurley
W. David Hager
Mike Harris
Neal Horsley
Henry Hyde
Alan Keyes
Henry Kissinger
Ted Klaudt
David Knight
William "Pete" Knight
Pierre LaBranche
Rush Limbaugh
Donald "Buz" Lukens
Rod Majors
Maya Marcel-Keyes
John McCain
Joseph McDade
Roy Moore
Glenn Murphy
Mike O'Neal
Bill O'Reilly
William H. Pryor Jr
Nancy Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Pat Robertson
Jack Ryan
Matt Sanchez
Rick Santorum
Rick Scarborough
John Schlafly
Phyllis Schlafly
Edward Schrock
Jamiel Terry
Randall Terry
Strom Thurmond
Randall Tobias
John Warner
William Weld
James West
Stephen White
Donald Wildmon
George Will
Pete Wilson
Also: Just how gay are the Republicans?
Republican "family values" honor roll
Study links homophobia with homosexual arousal
They did what?
August 27, 2007:
Sen Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested for lewd conduct in mensroom, and kept arrest hushed up for two months| | Excerpt: Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men's public restroom, according to an arrest report obtained by Roll Call Monday afternoon.
Craig's arrest occurred just after noon on June 11 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On Aug. 8, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the Hennepin County District Court. He paid more than $500 in fines and fees, and a 10-day jail sentence was stayed. He also was given one year of probation with the court that began on Aug. 8.
A spokesman for Craig described the incident as a "he said/he said misunderstanding," and said the office would release a fuller statement later Monday afternoon. |
August 8, 2007:
National President of Young Republicans resigns amid allegations of waking fellow Republican with unexpected sex| | Excerpt: The President of the National Young Republicans, under allegations of sexually harassing another man, has resigned from his post.
An older complaint, from 1988 alleged that Glenn Murphy, whose term at the helm of the group began last month, "had the blankets pulled up over the waist of [redacted] and was committing oral sex on him when he awoke."
Murphy sent an email to friends saying he was resigning from the post he has held for a month for business reasons. Later in the day, his attorney confirmed that Murphy had a sexual encounter with a man, claiming, however, that it was consensual. |
May 18, 2007:
Former South Dakota legislator arrested on sex charges| | A former South Dakota lawmaker is accused of molesting his own foster children and legislative pages.
Ted Klaudt, 49, a Republican rancher from Walker, faces a long list of charges: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking. ... |
April 27, 2007 Deputy Secretary of State resigns after admitting call-girl services| | Excerpt: Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias submitted his resignation Friday after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington escort service, multiple media outlets reported Friday. ...
Within minutes, Tobias's biography was deleted from the USAID Web site, the Washington Post reported on Saturday's front pages.
Comment: Tobias isn't an ordinary 'john'. He's a guy who used his government position to increase the spread of AIDS. As Bush's "AIDS Czar," he was perhaps most famous for his lying announcement that "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective." Tobias withheld AIDS money from groups who helped sex workers
Excerpt: Former U.S. AID director Randall Tobias, who resigned yesterday upon admitting that he frequented a Washington escort service, oversaw a controversial policy advocated by the religious right that required any US-based group receiving anti-AIDS funds to take an anti-prostitution "loyalty oath."
Aid groups bitterly opposed the policy, charging that it "was so broad -- and applied even to their private funds -- that it would obstruct their outreach to sex workers who are at high risk of transmitting the AIDS virus." But President Bush wouldn't budge. He signed a 2003 National Security Presidential Directive saying prostitution "and related activities" were "inherently harmful and dehumanizing."
Several groups and countries had their funding cut due to the policy. Brazil lost $40 million for "one of its most successful anti-AIDS strategies, persuading sex workers to use condoms or other measures to stop spreading the disease." |
March 7, 2007: Conservative award-winner is former gay porn star| | Excerpt: As several gay blogs revealed late yesterday, Corporal Sanchez was known during his halcyon days as Rod Majors, a majorly well-endowed gay porn star. (Photos of Corp. Sanchez aka Rod Majors in action can be viewed here. I warn you, this link is NOT to be clicked on if you have minors around or if you’re in a crowded workplace). According to Tom Bacchus, Sanchez was also a $200-an-hour male prostitute who advertised himself (here) as an "excellent top." |
Feb. 14, 2007: Republican Ex-Congressman charged with indecent exposure| | Excerpt: A former Pennsylvania congressman was accused Wednesday of exposing himself to two women at a beach resort. Joseph M. McDade, 75, was issued a summons on a charge of exposure of sexual organs, a misdemeanor that carries up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
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Sept. 29, 2006: Another Republican Congressman turns out to be a skanky perv| | Excerpt: Congressman Mark Foley (R-Florida), as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He also sponsored other legislation designed to protect minors from abuse and neglect. |
June 28, 2006:
Republican advertising consultant behind
anti-Clinton smear convicted of child molestation| | Excerpt: A political consultant whose company was behind a television ad accusing the Clinton-Gore administration of giving away nuclear technology was convicted of child molestation charges. |
April 28, 2006: Defense contractor allegedly provided hookers for Cunningham| | Excerpt: The allegations were raised by Mitchell Wade, another defense contractor who also has pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the bribery conspiracy involving former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the officials said. Cunningham is serving a prison term of eight years, four months after pleading guilty in November to taking $2.4 million in homes, yachts and other bribes.
Wade is cooperating with investigators as part of his plea agreement in February. He has told them that Brent Wilkes, a San Diego defense contractor who has been identified as a co-conspirator, secured prostitutes, limousines and suites at two Washington hotels for Cunningham, the officials said. |
April 20, 2006:
Republican claims tight finances, gets child support obligation cut in half, then gives $250,000 to his own campaign for Governor| | Excerpt: Scottsdale businessman Mike Harris has put $100,000 of his own money into his campaign for governor just months after convincing a judge he was too poor to make full support payments for his only child.
Harris said he got the court to cut his support payments in half, to $1,000 a month, after coming close to bankruptcy. Harris said he now is in much better financial health, which is why he has committed to spend up to $250,000 in personal funds on his bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
But Harris said he doesn't intend to start paying more to support John Carter, 7, who lives with his mother in Northern California. Harris, who describes himself on his campaign Web site as a "proud and loving father," said $1,000 a month "for one kid for a four-year marriage is pretty darn generous." |
Oct. 10, 2005:
Christian Coalition head molested three family members, family says| | Excerpt: After news broke that local law enforcement officials were investigating complaints that Louis Beres, longtime chairman of the Christian Coalition of Oregon, had molested three female family members when they were pre-teens, The Oregonian in Portland went out and interviewed Beres' family members.
Two told reporters that Beres, indeed, had molested them. All three said they have been interviewed for several hours by detectives.
"I was molested," said one of the women, now in her early 50s. "I was victimized, and I've suffered all my life for it. I'm still afraid to be in the same room with [Beres]."
The coalition led by Beres, 70, champions socially conservative candidates and causes. Its Web site describes the group as "Oregon's leading grassroots organization defending our Godly heritage." The group opposes abortion, gay rights, and stem cell research. It is affiliated with the national Christian Coalition, which was founded in 1989 by television evangelist Pat Robertson. |
July 28, 2005:
Anti-abortion activist raped girl at his "home for unwed mothers"| | Excerpt: John Burt, an anti-abortion extremist, was taken into custody yesterday after losing an appeal of his conviction for molesting a 15-year-old girl who was in his care at his so-called home for unwed mothers, Our Father’s House. A three-judge panel of the First District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously to uphold Burt’s conviction, the Associated Press reports. Burt will continue to appeal his conviction and sentence of 18 years in prison, according to the Pensacola News Journal.
In the early 1980s, John Burt, who was the Regional Director of Rescue America at the time, was at the center of disruptions at the Pensacola, Florida clinics. In 1986, Burt led an invasion into the Ladies Center Clinic in Pensacola, which led to his arrest and conviction along with Joan Andrews Bell, an associate of James Kopp, who was convicted of assassinating Dr. Barnett Slepian. Joseph Scheidler was touring at the time on his book, “99 Ways to Close an Abortion Clinic.” Scheidler was on the lawn in front of the clinic at the time of the invasion. This incident was the impetus for the NOW v. Scheidler case, which will be heard by the US Supreme Court for the third time this fall.
In 1993, Burt was leading a Rescue America protest outside the second Pensacola clinic when an Our Father's House volunteer, Michael Griffin, shot and killed Dr. David Gunn in the rear of the clinic. Burt was also an associate of Paul Hill, who murdered Dr. Bayard Britton and volunteer escort James Barrett outside the Ladies Center Clinic in Pensacola in 1994. Burt was videotaped helping Paul Hill identify Dr. Britton outside the clinic in the weeks before Hill shot and killed Dr. Britton and his clinic escort. |
May 30, 2005:
Morality mouthpiece raped and sodomized his wife, she says| | Excerpt: According to his ex-wife, Linda Carruth Davis, W. David Hager (Bush appointee to the Food and Drug Administration)'s public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible." |
May 13, 2005:
Anti-abortion advocate says he boinked farm animals Neal Horsley (anti-abortion activist) on Hannity & Colmes| | Alan Colmes: "You had sex with animals?"
Neal Horsley: "Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."
Alan Colmes: "I'm not so sure that that is so."
Neal Horsley: "You didn't grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?"
Alan Colmes: "Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?"
Neal Horsley: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality... Welcome to domestic life on the farm... You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually. ... If it’s warm and it’s damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it.” |
May 5, 2005:
Staunchly anti-gay Mayor of Spokane seems to be a gay child molester| | Excerpt: Mayor James E. West, a Republican foe of gay rights, was accused in a newspaper story Thursday of molesting two boys decades ago and was caught by the paper using the trappings of his office to try to court a young man on a gay online chat room.
West on Thursday denied the molestation allegations, but acknowledged he "had relations with adult men."
He admitted offering autographed sports memorabilia and a possible City Hall internship to what he thought was an 18-year-old man on the Web site Gay.com. The man was actually a private computer expert hired by The Spokesman-Review as part of a journalism sting operation.
West, 54, a former Boy Scout leader and Army paratrooper who was married briefly in the 1990s, denied that the online offers constituted abuse of his office, and he said he would serve out the more than three years remaining in his term.
"I am a law-abiding citizen," West said during a brief news conference. He took no questions.
The Spokesman-Review ran interviews Thursday with two men who allege West molested them decades ago when they were Boy Scouts and the mayor was a troop leader and sheriff's deputy. Both men have criminal records because of drug problems.
"I categorically deny allegations about incidents that supposedly occurred 24 years ago as alleged by two convicted felons and about which I have no knowledge," West said. |
April 15, 2005:
"I wanna marry the goat" by Bill O'Reilly, Fox News| | Excerpt: "So this is just the beginning, ladies and gentlemen, of this crazy gay marriage insanity -- is gonna lead to all kinds of things like this. Courts are gonna be clogged. Every nut in the world is gonna -- somebody's gonna come in and say, "I wanna marry the goat." You'll see it; I guarantee you'll see it." |
April 9, 2005:
Arch-Conservative consultant marries his gay partner| | Excerpt: Arthur J. Finkelstein, a prominent Republican consultant who has directed a series of hard-edged political campaigns to elect conservatives in the United States and Israel over the last 25 years, said Friday that he had married his male partner in a civil ceremony at his home in Massachusetts.
Mr. Finkelstein, 59, who has made a practice of defeating Democrats by trying to demonize them as liberal, said in a brief interview that he had married his partner of 40 years to ensure that the couple had the same benefits available to married heterosexual couples.
"I believe that visitation rights, health care benefits and other human relationship contracts that are taken for granted by all married people should be available to partners," he said.
He declined further comment on the wedding, which was in December. ... |
Feb. 10, 2005:
Phony White House reporter was real-life gay mail prostitute| | Excerpt: Jeff Gannon (aka Jim Guckert) began covering the White House two years ago for an obscure Republican Web site (Talon-News.com). He was known for his friendly questions, including asking Bush at last month's news conference how he could work with Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."
Gannon was also given a classified CIA memo that named agent Valerie Plame, leading to his grilling by the grand jury investigating her outing.
He came under lefty scrutiny after revelations that the administration was paying conservative pundits to talk up Bush's proposals. By examining Internet records, online sleuths at DailyKos.com figured out that his real name was Jim Guckert and he owned various Web sites, including HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com and MilitaryEscortsM4M.com. |
December 2004:
Anti-gay Republican Congressman outed as gay| | Excerpt: By 1998, Rep. David Dreier (R-California, who voted for the "Marriage Protection Act of 2001")’s homosexuality was at least tacitly acknowledged and accepted by high-level Republicans. ...
Assured that local reporters would guard his secret, Dreier has amassed an antigay voting record so egregious that it has helped him garner a 92% approval rating from the Christian Coalition. Apparently the evangelical group failed to notice that Dreier’s roommate and constant companion is none other than Brad W. Smith, his appropriately entitled chief of staff.
Smith must be worth his weight in gold, as Dreier is paying his major domo the highest salary he legally can: $156,600 a year. That’s just $400 less than White House heavyweights Karl Rove and Andy Card. |
Nov. 16, 2004:
Republican operative advertised for unprotected gay sex| | Excerpt: Dan Gurley (Field Director for the Republican National Committee) sought unprotected sex with multiple partners on Gay.com. Gurley admitted to screenname, which had been erased, and then said that someone else had probably used his screenname to publish said profile. However, spokesman for Gay.com said that deleted screennames are not reused. |
Aug. 31, 2004:
"Marriage amendment" sponsor seems to be gay as a lavender lily| | Excerpt: U.S. Rep. Ed Schrock (R-Virginia, co-sponsor of the Federal Marriage Amendment) abruptly announced his retirement late Monday, citing unspecified allegations that “called into question my ability to represent the citizens of Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District.”
... A Washington-based activist claimed on his Web site that Schrock engaged in homosexual activity, but offered no evidence. Schrock has refused to confirm or deny the allegations for two weeks.
“After much thought and prayer, I have come to the realization that these allegations will not allow my campaign to focus on the real issues facing our nation and region,” he said in a written statement. ... |
July 15, 2004:
Gay marriage is like marrying a turtle by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)| | Excerpt: "It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean that it's right. ... Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife." |
June 22, 2004:
Republican candidate wanted wife to accompany him to sex clubs, court papers say| | Excerpt: The ex-wife of Jack Ryan, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, alleged in court papers filed in 2000 that he took her to sex clubs and asked her to engage in sexual activity in front of other patrons. Portions of the documents, which related to a visitation dispute over the couple's son, were released Monday, after a judge in Los Angeles ordered them unsealed.
At a news conference Monday, Ryan reiterated the denial he made in his initial legal response to the charges by TV actress Jeri Lynn Ryan, in which he called the allegations "ridiculous" and "smut" and insisted he was "faithful and loyal to my wife throughout our marriage."
"I am sticking by the exact things I said five years ago," he said. "No one has ever said that I haven't abided by every single law or abided by my marriage vows or abided by commitments I've made to people."
Ryan also said he intends to stay in the Senate race, despite unease among fellow Republicans about the potential political fallout. "I think we'll be victorious in November," he said.
Jeri Ryan, who starred in the TV shows "Boston Public" and "Star Trek: Voyager," also issued a conciliatory statement, saying that she now considers her ex-husband "a friend" and has "no doubt that he will make an excellent senator."
While not addressing the sex club allegations directly in her statement, she said that "there was never any physical abuse in our marriage -- either to myself or to our son -- nor, to my knowledge, was he ever unfaithful to me."
"Jack is a good man, a loving father, and he shares a strong bond with our son. I wish him all the best," she said.
Several Chicago media organizations had sued for release of documents relating to the Ryans' divorce, saying the public interest outweighed their concerns about privacy and the possible effect on their now 9-year-old son. Friday, a judge in Los Angeles, where their divorce was litigated, agreed to unseal portions of more than 360 pages of documents, although large parts remained blacked out.
Both Ryans had objected to the release of details in the documents, but they opted not to appeal the ruling.
Jeri Ryan said her then-husband took her on three "surprise trips" in the spring of 1998 to New Orleans, New York and Paris, during which he took her to sex clubs. She said she refused to go in the first and went into the second at his insistence.
"It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," she said in the court document, adding that her husband "wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused."
She said on arriving at the third club, in Paris, "people were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill. [He] became very upset with me and said it was not a 'turn on' for me to cry."
In his legal response to her allegations, Jack Ryan said while he did arrange "romantic getaways" for the couple, they "did not include the type of activities she describes."
"We did go to one avant garde nightclub in Paris, which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return," he said.
Ryan, 44, a wealthy former investment banker, is locked in a tight race with Democrat Barack Obama for the seat being vacated by retiring GOP Sen. Peter Fitzgerald -- a potentially key contest in the battle for control of the evenly divided Senate.
Rumors about allegations in Ryans' divorce documents swirled during the GOP primary, but Ryan steadfastly refused to release them.
He said Monday that he and his wife tried to keep the documents sealed out of fear of the possible impact on their son, Alex.
"Jeri Lynn and I long ago put those issues behind us," he said. "It's not helpful for my son ... to reopen those conversations."
Ryan said he believes voters will not hold the allegations against him.
"I think that when voters look into their hearts and minds and say, 'Can we trust this fellow Jack Ryan, or does he try to do the best he can, or is he in this job for the right reasons?' I think they'll see that same sincerity to try do the right thing, though knowing that in the end that I am human and I do fail." |
Feb. 14, 2004:
Sexual battery complaint against "Defense of Marriage" Republican| | Excerpt:Oklahoma's Speaker of the House Larry Adair, D-Stilwell, confirmed in a telephone interview with the Enid News & Eagle Friday morning that Rep. Mike O’Neal, R-Enid, is the state lawmaker being investigated by Oklahoma City police on a sexual battery complaint.
O’Neal is author of “Defense of Marriage Act,” legislation that proposes a referendum on a constitutional amendment that would define a marriage as a union between one man and one woman. He also introduced a bill in January 2003 limiting the use of incompatibility as a reason for divorce. |
Oct. 23, 2003:
Anti-gay preacher charged with soliciting sex from gay teen prostitute| | Excerpt: Reverend Stephen White, infamous for preaching against homosexuality and sexual promiscuity at Yale and other college campuses, now faces charges that he solicited sex from a teenage boy in a Philadelphia suburb.
In recent years, White -- known to students as "Brother Stephen" -- has made informal speeches on Cross Campus and Beinecke Plaza denouncing minorities, homosexuals, religious groups and aspects of popular culture.
White was arrested in June after he allegedly offered $20 to a 14-year-old boy in West Chester, Pa. for permission to perform oral sex on him. |
June 13, 2003:
Former Mayor gets 37 years for child molestation| | Excerpt: Philip Giordano, the former Waterbury, Connecticut mayor convicted of violating the civil rights of two girls he sexually abused, has been sentenced Friday morning.
Giordano, who pleaded not guilty, was sentenced to 37 years in prison. Giordano's sister and mother attended the sentencing. His wife was not present.
"This case is the worst I have ever seen," said U.S. District Judge Alan Nevas in passing sentence. "Your conduct is the worst I have ever seen. I've seen drug dealers, murderers. What you did is indescribable."
Nevas also noted that Giordano did not speak during the sentencing hearing. "Most defendants have something to say, if nothing more than to turn and look at your mother and your sister and say, 'I'm sorry.'"
Nevas said Giordano had been "preying on two small, innocent children." "They knew nothing. You, sir, are a sexual predator."
Giordano also was convicted in March of conspiring with a prostitute, who is the mother of one of the girls and an aunt of the other. Jurors convicted him on 14 of 15 counts of using an interstate device -- a cell phone -- to arrange the meetings with the girls. Prosecutors said that Giordano used his cellular phone -- an interstate device -- to set up liaisons with the children and a convicted prostitute, Guitana Jones. Jones pleaded guilty to federal charges and testified at Giordano's federal trial.
The girls also testified against the mayor. Prosecutor Peter Jongbloed, who portrayed Giordano as a corrupt liar during his closing arguments, pointed out that Giordano has acknowledged having sex with a prostitute and taking payoffs from contractors.
The FBI was investigating municipal corruption -- a probe it labeled "Operation LandPhil" -- when it stumbled upon phone calls in which Giordano set up meetings with Jones, her daughter and her niece. Neither Giordano nor anyone else has been charged with corruption.
On one of the taped conversations, Giordano talks with Jones while his sons can be heard in the background playing.
On another call, Giordano told her, "I want one of the little girls."
On their last recorded conversation, Giordano warns the woman: "If my name gets mentioned, you might as well put a knife through your throat and kill yourself."
Giordano testified that he and the prostitute, a law client, had oral sex on numerous occasions but never in City Hall. He said the girls usually waited outside the law office.
Giordano said he became aroused watching one of the girls in the waiting room but said he did not touch the girls.
First elected mayor in 1995, Giordano ran for U.S. Senate against Democrat Joe Lieberman in 2000, when Lieberman also ran for vice president on Al Gore's ticket. |
April 23, 2003: Republican fund-raiser gets probation for child porn| | Excerpt: A political conservative and fund-raiser who collected for prominent leaders like Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms was given probation before judgment and was put on two years probation Wednesday.
Richard A. Delgaudio, of Burke, Va., who is a nationally-known Republican party fund-raiser, faced a Baltimore judge Wednesday afternoon on child porn charges. Delgaudio -- who pleaded guilty in February -- faced charges for producing child pornography after paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos in a Baltimore hotel. Prosecutors explained why Delgaudio received probation.
"Some could say he got off easy but Delgaudio got probation before a judgment because ... he owned up to what he did wrong," prosecutor Adam Rosenberg said.
According to charging documents, the alleged crimes occurred at the Deluxe Plaza Motel located on Pulaski Highway, 11 NEWS reported. The documents also state that Delgaudio allegedly brought into the room assorted photography equipment, women's clothing, lingerie and school girl's clothing.
Delgaudio has served as president of the Virginia-based Legal Affairs Council, which raised money for Oliver North's legal defense bills during his Iran-Contra trial. Delgaudio's resume includes fund-raising for legal defense money for North and Casper Weinberger, raising campaign funds for Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms and obtaining money for the defense of a police officer accused in the Rodney King beating.
He also was a co-author of the book China Doll: Clinton-Gore and the Selling of a Presidency.
Prosecutors said the probation before judgment will likely affect his career. "It effectively dismantles whatever business he was in," Rosenberg said.
In 1996, the Legal Affairs Council also held a fund-raising dinner for Laurence Powell, the ex-policeman from Los Angeles who was convicted of civil rights violations against Rodney King.
Delgaudio might have faced more charges, but the three pornography photo albums that were in his car when he was pulled over were thrown out as evidence because the search of the car was ruled illegal, 11 NEWS reported. |
April 22, 2003:
The dangers of sodomy by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania)| | Excerpt: "Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it's in the privacy of your own home, this "right to privacy," then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it's private, as long as it's consensual, then don't be surprised what you get. You're going to get a lot of things that you're sending signals that as long as you do it privately and consensually, we don't really care what you do. And that leads to a culture that is not one that is nurturing and necessarily healthy. I would make the argument in areas where you have that as an accepted lifestyle, don't be surprised that you get more of it.
"... We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold -- Griswold was the contraceptive case -- and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you -- this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family." |
June 2002:
How to prevent your son from becoming homosexual by Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family| | Excerpt: ... Meanwhile, the boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger. ... |
March 14, 2002:
Republican activist in touch with today's youth| | Excerpt: Also, last month, the National Republican Congressional Committee withdrew the "Republican of the Year" award that had been scheduled to be presented to Virginia party activist Mark A. Grethen, 44; the committee had just learned of his conviction on six counts of sex crimes involving children. |
Dec. 18, 2001: Republican activist accused of assaulting another girl| | Excerpt: A Republican activist already accused of sexually assaulting a girl he met on the Internet is now charged with assaulting another girl.
Randal David Ankeney, 30, was charged Monday with sexually assaulting a female whose age was not listed in court documents. A preliminary hearing on the new charge was scheduled for Jan. 14.
A trial for Ankeney, who once worked for the state Office of Economic Development, was originally scheduled for this week. Prosecutor Amy Mullaney said the alleged victim is not the 13-year-old Fountain, Colo., girl.
Prosecutors said Ankeney met that girl in an Internet chat room. Ankeney told her he was 25 years old and she claimed to be 14, court records said. Ankeney is accused of picking her up in Fountain in July and taking her to his apartment in downtown Colorado Springs, Colo., where he allegedly provided her with marijuana before they had sex. He dropped her off the next day at a fast food restaurant where she called a relative who then contacted police, according to his arrest report.
In that case, Ankeney is charged with sexual assault on a child, sexual exploitation of a child, committing a crime of violence, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, marijuana possession and possession of a bong.
Ankeney has worked as a volunteer on several local politicians' campaigns. Last year, Gov. Bill Owens appointed Ankeney as a business development representative in the Colorado Springs branch of the state Office of Economic Development. Ankeney resigned July 31, a day before he was arrested.
He had been making $63,000 a year in that position. Ankeney, who is free on $10,000 bond, declined comment on the allegations against him. |
April 20, 1999:
Columbine disaster was caused by working mothers taking birth-control pills by Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas)| | Excerpt: "Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills." |
Oct. 5, 1998:
Hypocrite of the House by Joe Conason, Salon| | Excerpt: As the House Judiciary Committee considers whether and how to initiate an impeachment inquiry, the mantle of respectability has been thrust onto the shoulders of Rep. Henry Hyde {R-Illinois), the committee's chairman. Journalists who discuss Hyde as if his first two names were actually "Universally Respected" are deeply invested in promoting this comforting image. That was why Salon's exposure of his longtime affair with a married woman so outraged the Washington establishment. Even more revealing than his ancient adultery was his description of that episode as a "youthful indiscretion."
... The problem is not so much that he was once in love with somebody else's wife, but that his heart has always belonged to the far right. He eagerly forgives the crimes and sins of those who share his politics, but those who do not -- like the president -- should expect no mercy.
Hyde displayed his tolerance for right-wing extremism last April, when he appeared in Chicago's federal courthouse as a character witness for his old friend Joseph Scheidler. As the ringleader of a national network devoted to shutting down abortion clinics with physical force and threats if necessary, Scheidler was the lead defendant in a civil RICO lawsuit brought by the National Organization for Women. In NOW vs. Scheidler, the plaintiffs argued that Scheidler, Operation Rescue's Randall Terry and others had organized a "racketeering conspiracy" over several years to deprive women of the right to choice. The jury upheld NOW's complaint and found Scheidler and his comrades responsible for 120 "criminal predicate" acts of violence.
Before the verdict came in, however, Hyde took the witness stand to vouch for Joe Scheidler. A veteran anti-abortion activist himself, Hyde said he had been Scheidler's friend for at least 25 years. "He is a hero to me," the Judiciary chairman testified. "He has the guts that I wish more of us had." But he later claimed he was unaware of Scheidler's notorious reputation for closing down abortion clinics with physical force.
Asked whether he endorsed Scheidler's "unlawful conduct," Hyde replied, "I would deplore unlawful behavior, especially if it's a good law, a moral law." Before judging Scheidler's lawbreaking, Hyde added, "I would want to talk to him to find out why he is advocating breaking the law." Hyde said his view of his friend's conduct "might" depend "on which law Mr. Scheidler is breaking." Although the judge frequently admonished him to answer "yes or no" when NOW attorneys cross- examined him, Hyde could barely restrain his sarcasm. He compared abortion clinics to Auschwitz and anti-abortion protesters to the civil rights movement. When a NOW lawyer inquired about a technique for barricading clinic doorways called "lock-and-block," Hyde shot back, "Did they do that at Selma?"
Hyde did agree that he had sworn to uphold the Constitution and the law as enunciated by the Supreme Court. But a few minutes later, when asked, "Mr. Hyde, would you vouch for the character or the integrity of anyone who openly proclaimed that he would not obey the laws of the land?" he answered, "Absolutely. Absolutely. If the law of the land is immoral and condones [killing] unborn children, I think that's heroic." In other words, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee believes that the law must be upheld, except when he feels that the law doesn't meet his definition of morality.
Perhaps Hyde really does feel that "abortuaries" are the same as death camps, although if so it is hard to see why he hasn't mounted the barricades himself. But Joe Scheidler isn't the only rightist miscreant for whom Hyde has sought lenient treatment. Another was his former Republican colleague from Illinois, Rep. Dan Crane, once a leading light of the new right.
In 1983, after a yearlong investigation by the House Ethics Committee, Crane was found to have engaged in an illicit sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl working as a congressional page. When the question of whether the House should expel, censure or merely reprimand Crane reached the floor, Hyde popped up to beg mercy for his friend.
"We sit here not to characterize the crime, the breach, the transgression, because we all know the transgression, which is admitted and it is stipulated as reprehensible." Even so, Hyde pleaded, "In searching our souls for the appropriate punishment, I ask the members to consider this situation in its totality, in its entire context."
Crane deserved mercy, Hyde explained, because he already had suffered enough. "He is embarrassed, he is humiliated, he is disgraced. And it endures; it is not over ... Every shred of dignity will be stripped away from Dan Crane, and it will endure." (Does any of this sound familiar yet?) Hyde concluded movingly, "I suggest to the members that compassion and justice are not antithetical; they are complementary. The Judeo-Christian tradition says hate the sin and love the sinner. We are on record as hating the sin, some more ostentatiously than others. I think it is time to love the sinner." Bowing to Hyde and others, the House voted to censure Crane rather than expel him.
Fifteen years later, however, we probably shouldn't hold our collective breath waiting for the Judiciary chairman to urge love and understanding for that liberal Democrat sinner in the White House.After all, Henry Hyde is a moral man, sworn to uphold the law. |
Feb. 1, 1989:
| | Excerpt: On February 1, 1989, an Ohio television station caught Rep. Donald "Buz" Lukens (R-Ohio) on camera at a Columbus, Ohio, McDonalds restaurant talking with the mother of a 16-year-old African-American girl. Lukens had been engaged in a sexual relationship with the girl while paying her mother. Refusing to resign from his seat, despite the demands of the Republican leadership, Lukens lost in the 1990 Republican primary to John A. Boehner. While serving out the remaining months of his term, an Capitol elevator operator accused him of fondling her. Lukens resigned from Congress on October 24, 1990, and was convicted of the misdemeanor of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and sentenced to 30 days in jail.
In 1995, he was charged with five counts of bribery and conspiracy related to actions he took while in Congress. He was convicted in March 1996 after a second trial. |
2003:
Republican Congressman blames downfall on "twin compulsions" of alcoholism and homosexuality| | Excerpt: In October 1980, Maryland Rep. Robert Bauman (R) is arrested for sex with a 16-year-old male prostitute. After the Republican lost his seat in November, he blames his downfall on his "twin compulsions" of alcoholism and homosexuality; Gays blame it on his hypocrisy. |
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