The Seven Gayest Anti-Gay Members of Congress

It’s no secret that politicians are duplicitous. It goes along with the job for most part. But when it comes to the issue of gay equality, no party’s members have been quite so intolerant and sanctimonious as Republicans, particularly in the way of conservatives. Yet it seems there’s never more than a few months that go by that we don’t hear about some “family values” conservative getting caught foot tapping in a men’s room or hiring rent boys for hotel room trysts. Among members of Congress, these are the seven “straight” candidates who I believe would be most likely to either come out on their own or be caught trying to pay a guy to stuff a ball gag in their mouth and burn them with a cigarette for 100 bucks (because freaky Republicans are still fiscal conservatives).

Aaron Schock

Why not start with the easiest target, right? The gay rumors are nothing new for Aaron Schock, given they’ve followed him his entire political career, dating back to 2004. It’s easy to look at him and aesthetically assume that because he’s well-groomed and good-looking he must be gay. As flattering a stereotype as that may be, time and time again, he’s done nothing to disprove the rumors, all the while managing to maintain a resounding zero percent rating on the HRC’s scale of gay-friendly elected officials. It’s sort of ironic, given he seemingly lacks the ability to articulate his own opposition to gay equality.

David Vitter

Ah, David Vitter. Here’s a man who’s spoken out in favor of abstinence-only education (“…saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness”), opposed amending the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill to better protect victims of sexual assault and rape at the hands of federal military contractors, and has proposed that the U.S. Constitution be amended to ban same-sex marriage (“I’m a conservative who opposes radically redefining marriage, the most important social institution in human history”). It all sounds like typical hardline conservative bullshit, until you take into consideration that, as he was saying all of this, he was a client of Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s, better known as the D.C. Madam. This is an instance of “the lady doth protest too much me thinks,” combined with hazy morals and blatant hypocrisy. There’s a thin line between cheating on your wife, abandoning your own oft-trumpeted religious beliefs, and hiring hookers, and giving handy j’s behind a dumpster in Tenleytown.

Jeff Flake

In this instance, when I say he’s pretty gay, I mean it in a completely complimentary sense. While, yes, like a lot of his Republican counterparts, he’s voted to Constitutionally ban same-sex marriage, he’s not as bad (which really doesn’t speak volumes), given he voted to prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation, and was one of a handful of Republican Senators who rapidly and publicly shunned Arizona’s discriminatory SB1062 bill, and asked it be vetoed. By congressional standards, he’s far and away one of the more handsome Senators and, most importantly, ripped:

Yes ma’am.

Michele Bachmann

I know what you’re thinking. “But Lucas, she’s notoriously anti-gay and has the highest rate of LGBT youth suicides in the country within her district, which she refused to publicly condemn or even speak about. She’s not anti-gayly gay, she’s just unabashedly anti-gay.” While that may be true, let’s be honest: the girl looks good, albeit a bit deranged in the eyes. You don’t get hair and makeup like that unless there’s a gay somewhere on your team, and I’m not just talking about her closet case of a husband. While we’re on that subject, though, you’ve got to applaud her dedication to being a top-notch beard. She’s deluded herself so much that the notion her husband is a flaming homo has never even crossed her mind, making her the only person to lay claim to that distinct feat.

James Lankford

James Lankford has an abhorrent voting record when it comes to civil liberties in general and, as far as I can tell, seems to only be in politics to make money off of voting in lobbyists’ favor, but elsewhere, I’m not sure if it’s just the tinges of gay-face he’s giving or the fact that I want him to be gay to feed into my ginge fetish.

…okay, it’s just the former. Those gelled bangs scream “repressed Midwestern homosexual.” At least his wife/lavender marriage companion is pretty.

Duncan D. Hunter

Upon first glance, he reeks of douche. Then you read through his voting record and he is confirmed to be a douche. He’s noted for his military service, but based on his execrable stances on gay equality, he strikes me as one of those military bros who, in public, keeps the façade of a homophobic asshole going, but in private trolls Grindr for power bottoms he can call “faggot” during sex. Anyone as staunchly opposed to everything gay as he is makes me question if there’s something deeper going on there…and I’m not just talking about anal sex.

Jack Kingston

Between Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, it’s apparent that Georgia is awful at choosing U.S. Senators, which is why it should come as a surprise to no one that Jack Kingston stands a fair shot at taking over the Senate seat Chambliss will be vacating in 2014. When he’s not telling poor schoolchildren that they should sweep floors in order to be fed a school lunch while subsequently racking up tens of thousands of dollars in personal taxpayer-funded expenses and advocating against taxpayer health subsidies while himself receiving taxpayer health subsidies, he’s diligently working to maintain his zero percent HRC score. However, what sets off my gaydar is that I can’t look at him without being reminded of Uncle Arthur from “Bewitched”.

I hate to even sully Paul Lynde’s good, booze-soaked name by comparing him to a puritanical, hypocritical bigot, but they even sound similar. If Jack Kingston weren’t a humorless homophobe, I’d fully expect a sexual double entendre at the end of each of his floor speeches.

Why Modern Populism is Advancing Purist Liberalism

As has held true throughout many historical eras of economic depression, the concept of populism–essentially, the belief that it’s “the people” (the 99 percent) versus “the elite” (the one percent)–has experienced a resurgence amongst the general population, given our current plight. It’s not hard to see why an ever-disseminating middle class would find the concept of populism attractive, given their one-percent counterparts continue to profit in record-breaking numbers, even during the worst of economic times.

Conservatives attempt to curb this influx by introducing catchy terms into the political vernacular like “wealth redistribution” and subsequently demonizing them as fervently as possible (along the lines of faux-“death panels” in opposition to the Affordable Care Act), in hopes that they’ll be able to disillusion the notoriously attention-deficit American population into adhering to their beliefs by blinding them with brash ostentation. It’s the political equivalent of an unmasked serial bank robber throwing glitter in the faces of witnesses and hoping they’ll forget he just committed a heist. The very rightists who allowed greed-soaked capitalists to almost single-handedly decimate the U.S. economy are now attempting to save face by preying on the ignorance of the general population.

To be clear, liberalism overall doesn’t advocate taking from the rich to give to the poor, as many conservatives would have you believe; rather, it promotes the idea that everyone should pay their fair share. GASP! A novel idea, I know. Mention the idea of a tax proration to a conservative, though, and suddenly even the poorest among them paying some of the highest tax percentage rates become advocates for the rich.

Convervatives’ attempts have been somewhat fruitful within their base, but as has been consistently proven, American moderates, the sheeples they may be, do wield some influence, which is why the fact that a lot of them have unwittingly subscribed to populist beliefs is noteworthy. They’ve finally come to the realization that it’s unfair for wealthier people to receive innumerable tax breaks and a lower rate of tax than them, all the while they’re reduced to living in relative squalor while the likes of Harold Simmons continues to raise his $9 billion net worth.

More and more, people are coming to refute the conservative ideology that the rich must be richer in order for us all to be better off. Even outside of basic human logic, mathematically and economically that doesn’t make sense. That shift in credence is representative of the fact that Americans are slowly but surely coming to realize that the conservative ideals that in large part led to economic collapse is not the archetype that is going to save us from it.

 

Probity void of humanity is not morality at all.

On August 12, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law Bill 1266, which is designed to offer special protections for transgender students in the state. Though the bill–nicknamed “The Bathroom Bill”–won’t legally take effect until January 1, 2014, it’s already been met with both impassioned support and rigid disapproval, with critics arguing it would allow for potentially harmful intermingling of the sexes in school facilities respectively designated for either males or females, such as bathrooms and locker rooms. Specifically, the bill states:

This bill would require that a pupil be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.

Statistics have consistently shown that not only are LGBTQ students in general significantly more likely to be emotionally and/or physically harassed than their heterosexual counterparts, but that transgender students are particularly susceptible to persecution. Although states like Connecticut, Washington, Massachusetts, and Colorado have integrated policies designed to protect transgender students, California is the first state to pass transgender-specific legislation on a statewide level.

For the most part, the denunciation of this bill from critics is the result of what most transgender discrimination stems from: a lack of understanding. What dissenters are trying to portray the bill as is an excuse for a boy to one day wake up, decide, “I’m going to be a girl today,” and therefore would be allowed under the law to use the girls’ restroom, locker room, etc. Former presidential nominee Mike Huckabee echoed this misguided sentiment on his Fox News show, Huckabee, saying:

“If the child–a boy–walks in and says, ‘You know what, I really am feeling my girl’s side,’ he gets to go shower with the girls when he’s 14. I mean, I’m just thinking of all the 14-year-old boys I went to school with, and how many of them would have awakened with that revelation.”

What this absurd notion fails to take into account is that most transgender people don’t simply decide at random on a whim that they no longer want to identify as their birth-given sex. In fact, most transgender children have established their gender identity by age four. Even more eye roll-inducing is California assemblyman Tim Donnelly’s proclamation that, due to the bill’s passage, he will be removing one of his sons from the public school system after his son’s “horrified” reaction at the prospect of sharing bathrooms with female students, a highly skewed interpretation of the bill that amounts to an outright lie.

What opponents of the bill and a large portion of the population don’t understand about transgenderism is that gender identity is first and foremost determined by a person’s psychology, not physiology. Not only are foes of the bill protesting it with an argument that has absolutely no scientific basis, but there is also “no single reported incident of any misconduct” in districts where similar legislation has been introduced.

Laws designed to protect children who are notably and principally vulnerable to abuse when it does not negatively affect anyone else is not a moral infringement; rather, it’s a human obligation. Probity void of humanity is not morality at all.