Wes Goodman is the Republican state legislator for Ohio who ran on a religious right agenda of opposing LGBT rights and same sex marriage. His career ended last week after the discovery of Goodman having sex with a man in his office. Things that makes this legislator less of a good man is not his apparent homosexuality but his dishonesty and hypocrisy. He is not only married to a woman but has been a leading voice against homosexuals.
Goodman, 33, was elected on “family values” and “natural marriage”, a platform that came crashing down according to the Columbus Dispatch, when he was found in the intimate scene at work.
Goodman’s Twitter account describes him as “Christian. American. Conservative. Republican. Husband to @Beth1027.” Nevertheless, he appeared to have lived a double life including pursuing other men at work.
The Human Rights Campaign previously listed Jordan in their Hall of Shame in 2014 for his work to block marriage equality in the District of Columbia.
Despite such allegations, there is no sign of a decline in faith-based politics, as vividly shown with Roy Moore in Alabama.
Trickle down economics, courtesy of Republicans, harms more people than Goodman’s duplicity.
Republican politicians screw the majority of their constituents to benefit the wealthy.
Republican politicians screw the majority of their constituents to benefit the wealthy.
LOL! I completely agree with everything after the word Republican.
Nice try though.
I propose extending your edit, appending “and themselves”.
Thank you Darren. I completely agree. How about this:
politicians screw the majority of their constituents to benefit the wealthy and enrich themselves.
This is exactly why gays and lesbians need to come out of the closet. Trying to force themselves to live a straight life just leads to broken hearts and ruined lives all around. Just be honest.
He must have been fighting his own nature for a long time, which may have been why he was so outspoken about the issue. Losing battle, and lying doesn’t fix anything.
Just read an article about the venerable Charlie Rose, who has been acting inappropriately with various staffers, groping them, for decades. . .he is alleged to have invited these women to his home, on the pretext of having to complete additional work, where he proceeded to walk and prance around nude in front of them. Will he be crucified, as well? Lose his show? Or, will he be protected and given a pass for being the good, little, liberal soldier all of these years, where he will spared the wrath of the gods?
will BE spared. . .
Both Rose and talk A.M. radio, provide voice for segments among the richest 0.1%.
Just because he’s attracted to men and goes for nooners in his office doesn’t mean that he thinks homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle and that two dudes should be “husband and wife.” He may have what he considers aberrant sexual impulses that he gives in to, but is nonetheless disgusted by and wishes he didn’t have such compulsions. There are many things people do that they wouldn’t advocate as societal norms. Maybe it’s hypocrisy, or maybe they’re just weak, because they’re human.
It’s equally likely that Goodman was exploiting the views of the religious right so that he could get their votes. The end goal was to deliver to the rich backers of the Republican Party, the legislation that would make them wealthier. The same explanation likely applies to the motivation of the recently resigned, married Republican legislator who told his girlfriend to get an abortion, excusing the obvious contradiction by claiming his staff wrote his policy.
Then, there’s the hard-to-dismiss case of Ohio Republican Sen. Portman who led the cause against gay marriage …..until his son came out.
Whether or not these flawed human beings–and, yes, we are all flawed, all, imperfect–actually succeed or not in living up the standards that they purport to represent and embody, that simple fact doesn’t diminish one very important and crucial concept. A concept, unfortunately, that, consistently, seems to get lost in these conversations, where we dote on whether a yearbook was or was not signed forty years ago. Where we expel untold amounts of energy in trying to decipher handwriting and ink samples. The bottom line is quite simple: the people of both Alabama and Ohio elected these public servants. They didn’t elect them because they believed that they may, or may not, have had a penchant for teenage girls. They didn’t elect them because they thought that they were living a double life–married, a wife and kids, at home, and blowing a guy at the office. No. The majority of the voters in these respective states elected these individuals because they agreed with the policies that these oh, so flawed individuals espoused. Preached. Espoused. Defended. Protected. Get it? Isn’t that really the bottom line? That seems to get lost in the mix, and the sad attempt, to blur the most important part of these episodes, isn’t being attempted by accident. By focusing on the alleged flaws and perceived hypocrisy of these representatives, the main and most prevalent theme–whether it is identified or not–is to diminish and invalidate the ideas, concepts, beliefs, values and platforms presented by these individuals. The ideas, concepts, beliefs, values and platforms which were roundly supported by the voters. It is a sad and desperate attempt to disparage the majority of voters who fervently believed in what these flawed individuals proposed. Sorry. It doesn’t work. These guys could be convicted of setting an orphanage, on fire, on Christmas Day, and it would still not serve to nullify the multitude of voters who believed, and still believe in, the values that these perceived hypocrites espoused and supported. The people voted for the ideas, the values. . .the fact that these elected officials may not be pure and unflawed beings does not invalidate the votes of all of those who supported their public views. The private lives of the Kennedy clan come to mind. Wild, crazy, whoring-around-lives, where women were treated like sh@t, for decades, by these so-called heroes, yet, some how, some way, we are able to see past those indiscretions. We are able to ferret out the good that they accomplished in terms of policies and actions, even though the policies and actions were a stark contrast to how these creatures behaved privately. We are able to call the days of JFK, in the White House, Camelot, despite the fact that JFK f@cked every intern he could get his hands on, cheated repeatedly on his wife and lived, by most accounts, far from a wholesome life, despite the propaganda shots depicting him as a family man. Do we include the Kennedys in the long list of hypocritical politicians, or are the Kennedys the third rail? Untouchable?
Good post bam bam.
What percentage of voters do you believe consider the character of the candidates at least as important as the platform they stand on? If they think like I did pre-2008, I doubt most voters consider the entire platform, maybe one plank, but most importantly what letter comes after their name R or D.
I used to believe term limits would be unnecessary if we just promoted civics literacy. I’ve changed my mind. Term limits will be necessary as long as Congress sets the rules on oversight of their own behavior. Term limits will be necessary as long as the taxpayers are charged for the abuses of government rather than the individuals committing the abuses.
Term limits will be required until human nature is fundamentally changed.
Check the state of Ohio’s political scene to see the machinations that Republican politicians use to circumvent democracy. Term limits may actually have worsened the situation, if that’s possible. At one point something like 1/3 of the legislative seats were filled with appointees who had not been elected. Those who were term limited bailed for greener political pastures opening up the system to political appointments.
The fight should be against gerrymandering (Timken Island) and against money in politics (ECOT).
The U. S. should follow the Scandinavian political model.
Yes. Next.
JFK- dead for more than 50 years- another example of the old Russian propaganda tactic, “What about—ism” described by John Oliver.
Far from being any sort of propaganda tactic, my comment–for those intelligent enough to grasp the contents–was quite simple. If we are, suddenly, going to apply a strict set of moral and sexual standards to our elected officials, then let’s do it and didn’t it, across-the-board. Let’s hold all of them, and, I do mean, all of them, to the same stringent rules and standards of decency, where wrong is wrong, regardless of whether or not there is a D or an R following the name. If predatory sexual behavior is considered wrong, then, by God, let’s not forget to include all of those whom we seem to venerate and hold sacrosanct. Yes, like the Kennedys. Dead or not, the Kennedy clan was, and still is, America’s royal family. Let’s be fair. Let’s be even-handed. If bloated, middle-aged women, can get all excited about getting their hair set and teased at the local beauty salon, just so that they can get on camera, garner their 15 minutes of fame, destroy the life and career of a dedicated public servant, by blubbering about unsubstantitated nonsense involving them canoodling with a man, twice their age, from forty years ago–when both they and their respective families should have known better than to allow this email alleged to transpire–then, yes, I can dredge up the Kennedys–even the dead ones, whom we are supposed to adore and idolize–and remind the public of their obscene, abusive, sick, demented and outrageous behavior, spanning decades and decades in American history. Is that too much like Russian propaganda for you? If so, oching charoso. . .very good.
Should have been. . .let’s do it and do it, across-the-board.
Should’ve been. . .should have known better than to allow this to. . .
“What about—ism”
So do you disagree with George Santayana’s often referenced quote: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
JFK won’t repeat his mistakes of the past because he’s dead. The Republican Party grooms candidates for hypocrisy (in the current quarter century). And, its candidates are uniformly funded by the wealthy to serve the wealthy. The opposition party has lost 1000 seats in the past 8 years, do tell what is the history lesson of JFK for voters?
BTW, the Columbus Dispatch reported that, prior to Goodman’s election, the president of two high visibility, well-funded evangelical activist groups, knew about Goodman’s’s conduct, “unzipping a young man’s pants…fondling him”, an incident which occurred at an event hosted by one of the evangelical groups. The reporting stated that the president asked Goodman to leave the race. When the candidate didn’t, “the information was not widely shared.” Speculating… leverage, like in the case of former Republican Speaker, Hastert, could align a politician with interests that acted against his constituent majority?
Now, if he only sold pancake mix, we could really heap on the disgust and condemnation.
Maybe he was doing a little opposition research, you know, along the lines of the advice of Atticus Finch.
“First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
The foundation of politics is hypocrisy. This is nothing. Every time a politician presents his or her self as representing the people who voted for him or her and not the oligarchs pulling their strings, we have the essence of our government, hypocrisy.
He’s what you’d call a “Narnia”: so deeply in the closet that he came out the other side.
Thanks for the term. It is perfect and usable in other context as well
Self-loathing.
It has long been known that those who seem to be most fanatic about something, are trying to cover up their own guilt.
There has always been a thing about some married gays being afraid to come out of the closet, so they lash out. Just ask Hillary.
Conflicted.
The higher the self-righteousness the greater the fall
Hypocrisy, you can always depend on a politician to live opposite of what they preach.