The University of Wisconsin–La Crosse is embroiled in a controversy surrounding its Chancellor Joe Gow after it was revealed he and his wife made porn videos under the name “Sexy Happy Couple.” He has been removed from his position, though the now unhappy couple could now challenge the action in the courts.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that “Gow, 63, and his wife, Carmen Wilson, appear in videos on several porn websites using ‘Sexy Happy Couple’ as the account name, a moniker also used on at least two social media accounts.” It further noted that “the couple also published two books under pseudonyms detailing their experiences in the adult film industry. Both books and the social media accounts feature photos clearly showing Gow (pictured) and Wilson.”
Notably, Wilson chaired the search committee that selected Gow and then served as his chief of staff from 2008-2011. The couple married in 2014.
Gow has not been subtle about his interest in porn. He previously invited a porn performer to come to campus as part of a “Free Speech Week” event and reimbursed the speaker’s fee out of his own money,
The action by the Board of Regents was based on the impact of the scandal on the school. UW System President Jay Rothman declared “In recent days, we learned of specific conduct by Dr. Gow that has subjected the university to significant reputational harm. His actions were abhorrent.”
Gow will retain his position as a tenured professor, though a complaint is reportedly pending.
In becoming Chancellor, Gow signed a contract that stated that “The Chancellor may not engage in any activity that may be adverse to, or competitive or inconsistent with the interests of the University of Wisconsin System.”
However, this was conduct that was both legal and conducted outside of his official duties without reference to his academic or administrative positions.
I cannot claim to understand this desire of some people to post videos of themselves having sex. It is reminiscent of the recent controversy involving Virginia Democratic candidate Susanna Gibson who was shown to have engaged in sex acts on the Internet with her husband. Gibson and her husband posted more than a dozen videos that were archived on a site called Chaturbate in September 2022 shortly before she announced her candidacy for office. Viewers were told that they could pay for her to perform specific sex acts “for tips.”
Gibson has made dubious threats to sue over the disclosures of the videos and even alleged that the disclosures constituted a sex crime. She attempted to portray the controversy as an attack on all women. It seemed to work. Gibson came close to winning the recent election despite the scandal as the Democratic candidate for the state legislature.
The difference is that no one suggested that Gibson was barred from serving as a state legislature due to her porn history.
One does not have to share Gow’s fetish or approve of his videos to raise concerns over the free speech implications of this action.
Engaging in pornographic films is an expressive act and has free speech protection, in my view. The objections of many to such films is moral. While the couple is married, many view porn as sinful and corrupting in society. However, Gow is allowed to hold opposing views and to engage in such expressive acts.
The question is whether the contract alters the question. Many contracts, including media contracts, contain such provisions. The standard “morals clause” is triggered by criminal conduct or conduct that brings “public disrepute, scandal, or embarrassment.” These clauses are written broadly to protect the news organizations and their “brand.”
Yet, this is a state university effectively punishing Gow for arguably protected speech. Part of the concern is where the university draws the line. Gow previously sponsored an event with a porn star on campus and that was not viewed as violative. What if he simply produced porn videos but was not featured in them? What if he advocated for the rights of porn actors or consumers?
Universities have historically cracked down on those with unpopular social, political, or religious views. Conservatives and libertarians have long been targeted by such campaigns. We cannot protect some while exempting others from such protections.
These cases involving public employees with porn histories have regularly arisen from lunch ladies to teachers to students. However, they often involve primary and secondary levels of education. This involves a college where the students are adults and capable of making their own judgments about moral or sexual questions.
This could prove a novel but significant free speech case in delineating the scope of protected speech or conduct for state employees outside of their employment.
If Obama had a son, he’d cut off his junk, plagiarize his resume and get a high paying gig at Harvard.
James Manning recently interviewed a high school friend of Barack Obama, who claims to have known him back in the 1970s as Barry Soetoro. Mia Marie Pope says that Obama identified himself as a foreigner and a crack-smoking homosexual. Ms. Pope was born in 1962, in California, and moved with her family to Hawaii when she was still an infant. Pope claims that she did not meet or see Barry Soetoro until about 1977. She said that she, Barry and other kids would hang out at the beach at Waikiki. Mia Marie Pope says that Barry Soetoro “always portrayed himself as a foreign student. While Soetoro was a little older than her and didn’t always run around with the circle of friends that she had, Pope says that he “very much was in sort of the ‘gay community,’” which she says that even back then was “thriving.” “We knew Barry as, just common knowledge, that girls were never anything that he was ever interested in, and as a young teenager….as a young girl…..it was clear to me that Barry was strictly into men,” Pope said. She also indicated that she had no desires for him and said that they didn’t get along, largely in part to the fact that he was “a pathological liar, even back then.” Pope said that Soetoro’s lies were “egotistical” and always to “boost himself.” She referenced Barry “bumming cigarettes,” and said that as soon as someone would give him a cigarette, he would instantly turn and walk away, after he had gotten what he wanted. In Pope’s words, “He seemed to be incapable or genuine about anything.” Ms. Pope said that Barry Soetoro was always “getting with these older white men.” She recognized that he was one that had cocaine, which she said was “newsworthy” in the groups she hung out in. They then began to believe it was Soetoro’s engagements (ie. Homosexual acts) with these older white men is how he “procured” cocaine. “In other words, he was having sex with these older white guys, and that’s how he was getting his cocaine to be able to freebase,” she told Manning. Mia Pope also said that she actually saw Obama dress up as a transvestite. She remarked that it was during the era of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, starring Tim Curry, that this took place. When asked by Manning why she came forward, and others were not, she said that because she is a Christian and deeply concerned about her country. She says that if Barack Obama was doing a “good job” today, then she would not worry about his past. She wondered when Obama first came on the scene if he had, in fact, “changed his ways.” Apparently, according to Pope, he had not. Pope said that she didn’t care about his homosexuality or the fact that he used drugs in the past, but was concerned about who he was as an adult. Pope says that her willingness to come forward has taken courage, and she believes it is “righteous” to speak out against Barack Obama. “I refuse to be a coward,” she added. Ms. Pope also says that she had called the Federal Bureau of Investigations several times to expose Barack Obama’s use of fake Social Security numbers, and nothing was done about it. This took place several years ago. Pope said that when Barry’s name began to be pushed forward as Barack Hussein Obama, she thought there was “something shady” going on. She was familiar with the claims of Larry Sinclair, the man who claimed prior to the 2008 elections that he had a homosexual relationship with Barack Obama and the two had smoked crack cocaine together. Sinclair was rumored to have been killed in a hit and run in November of 2011. Pope also said that for Obama to have attended the school he did, Punahou High School(which he graduated from in 1979), required a lot of money and it required that he start from kindergarten, but seeing that he was entering mid-level; she believes that he must have had “something stellar” which allowed him to get in, especially when he was “fresh from Indonesia.” Manning suggested that Obama’s involvement with older white men is what got him into Punahou, and Pope seems to agree, though she used a reference to the CIA or some “force” that got Obama “set up” at Punahou. “It was certainly not a natural thing,” she said. They both agreed that has been the way things happened for young Soetoro from Punahou to Occidental to Columbia to Harvard. Pope pointed out that interviews were conducted with those who were in the same classes at Columbia that Obama was supposed to be in and not a single person remembers him being there! When Dr. Manning asked Pope why she thought that Larry Bland, Nate Spencer and Donald Young (all member of the church Obama attended, Trinity Church of Christ, where Jeremiah Wright pastors) were all killed within days of each other in Chicago, she said that she believed Obama’s handlers like what he is doing to the country. Therefore, in her opinion, they have kept a lid on these murders.
Speaking of higher education, Harvard University of the “Poison Ivy League” retains an abject fraud and plagiarist, one even more egregious than the proven plagiarist, fraud, and philanderer, Martin Luther King, the one and ony, Claudine Gay.
_____________________________________________________________________
DR. CAROL SWAIN
YOU HAVE GOT TO UTTERLY LOVE THIS BRILLIANT BLACK WOMAN.
I DO!
“Well, if Claudine Gay was a White male or female, or even a Black conservative, she would have been fired by now.”
“The penalty normally for plagiarism at that level is that you lose your position, but most people would resign. “
“She plagiarized my work as well as several other people.”
“It’s my understanding that 20 instances of plagiarism was found in her dissertation and publish words.”
“There’s no way you can’t know it. My book won the highest prize in the profession and two other national prizes.”
“It was cited by the US Supreme Court and numerous lower court decisions. There’s no way that Claudine Gay, her committee members, her reviewers, and other people didn’t know that she was drawing on my research.”
“Harvard University is morally bankrupt and we see this at every turn.”
“Now they have themselves in a conundrum where they’re trying to redefine what is plagiarism. I believe they’re doing this because they don’t want to fire their first ever Black president, someone who was clearly a DEI appointee.”
“For me, as a person who became a Black conservative, not citing my work had long term consequences because your statue in political science and in any other fields pretty much depends on how much you have cited your citations.”
“If you have someone that’s as prominent as she became and they have research out there, and they are not acknowledging the similar work in the area, that damages you because you don’t get the number of citations you would have gotten.”
“The scandal is indicative of a larger problem with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on college campuses.”
“It’s not following the Constitution. It’s very dangerous.
“It’s harming people and racial and ethnic minorities are the ones that are harmed most. I think that people need to realize that critical race theory, diversity, equity and inclusion programs are not necessary.”
“[The] White progressives [backing Gay at Harvard have caused irreparable damage].”
– Dr. Carol Swain
____________________
‘[Harvard’s governing body…found Gay responsible for ‘a few instances of inadequate citation,’ and that Gay is requesting corrections to address those instances. The statement also included a statement of support for Gay, claiming she ‘is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.'”
– Harvard University
So, let’s get this right . . .
A senior executive for a taxpayer funded university has a constitutional right to perform in online porn videos.
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
-George Orwell
ONLY AN INTELLECTUAL COULD BELIEVE THEM!
SO TRUE, SO TRUE!
INSANE “ASYLUM” FRAUD
YES, a senior executive at a taxpayer-supported university does have a constitutional right to perform in online porn videos. The question here is completely different which you are too prejudiced and unintelligent to perceive: does that senior executive aforementioned have a constitutional right to continue in his position as a university chancellor and does the contractual clause pertaining to behaving in a manner adverse to his employer apply to justify his termination.
I certainly hope it’s Turley’s editor who doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a ‘legislature’ and a ‘legislator’ . Surely a law professor knows that a ‘legislature’ is a group while a ‘legislator’ is an individual.
Presumably, riverkinga16 has never, I repeat, never made a mistake.
Professor Turley advocates strongly for Gow’s free speech rights, but if brought to trial, I doubt this case will ever reach a ruling on any of the protected free speech aspects that he raises.
The university’s counsel will argue, and the presiding judge will almost certainly agree, that whether Gow had a constitutional right to perform pornographic acts in public is irrelevant. It is a simple contractual question: Were Gow’s activities something that was “…adverse to, or competitive or inconsistent with the interests of the University of Wisconsin System.”
If confined to that contractual question, Gow will lose. As Professor Turley notes, “The objections of many to such films is moral.” According to Pew Research 45% of Wisconsin residents are “highly religious.” For these residents, Gow’s porn videos, whether protected speech or not, would be considered highly immoral, and his leadership of the university would be seen as adverse to and inconsistent with the reputational interests of the university, thus violating his contractual obligation to the university.
The university’s lawyer could object as irrelevant any effort to inject free speech protections into this contractual dispute, and I believe the presiding judge would sustain the irrelevancy argument under the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid.)
Please post the sex video so we can make our own judgment. Thanks.
The Board of Regents got their undies in a bunch over “proper” sex, i.e. hetero married sex. Wonder if they’d express disapproval had a UW official posted some LGBTQ fun. Guessing they’d hear about it, especially from the Madison campus.
No. That’s not the point. The point is you allowed them to. You allowed the Board of Regents to be taken over by psychotic communists. Just like you allowed “Crazy Abe” Lincoln to do his evil “Reign of Terror.” Secession was and is fully constitutional and reprehensible slavery must have been abrogated by legal means, by legislation. In a society of laws, the laws must be strictly adhered to. Southern States would have seceded, failed, and reunited of necessity, of sanity. Long-suffering slaves must have been freed by law and compassionately repatriated, which is the common and identical demand of all abductees – to go home!
Only people sold into slavery by enemy African tribes were abducted. if slavery had ended when slaves were still being kidnapped and sold from Africa, of course they should have been allowed to go home.
Subsequent generations were born in the US. This was their home. They would have descended from people of multiple tribal histories, and Europeans, as slave masters sexually abused their slaves. Where should their descendants be force to go? Cameroon, the Congo, Kansanje, or Great Britain, the ancestral homeland of the rapist slave owner? The descendants of slaves did not know any African languages or intact culture. They only knew slavery.
Forcibly deporting people who were born into slavery in the US, utterly unprepared to live in Africa, would have been nearly as immoral as slavery. Thanks for all the forced labor and for taking the abuse, now get out? No. An ideal solution would have been paying for their freedom, as was done in Great Britain, and helping change the agricultural south to a paid labor force, educating freed slaves, and setting them up properly for life, rather than relegating them to sharecropping.
The March to Atlanta did not need to happen, and neither did sharecropping or Jim Crow.
Racial separation, Lincoln went on to say, “must be effected by colonization” of the country’s blacks to a foreign land. “The enterprise is a difficult one,” he acknowledged,
but “where there is a will there is a way,” and what colonization needs most is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.
To affirm the humanity of blacks, Lincoln continued, was more likely to strengthen public sentiment on behalf of colonization than the Democrats’ efforts to “crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him …” Resettlement (“colonization”) would not succeed, Lincoln seemed to argue, unless accompanied by humanitarian concern for blacks, and some respect for their rights and abilities. By apparently denying the black person’s humanity, supporters of slavery were laying the groundwork for “the indefinite outspreading of his bondage.” The Republican program of restricting slavery to where it presently existed, he said, had the long-range benefit of denying to slave holders an opportunity to sell their surplus bondsmen at high prices in new slave territories, and thus encouraged them to support a process of gradual emancipation involving resettlement of the excess outside of the country.
– Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857
I am not responsible for the membership of the WI Board of Regents. Incidentally, Abraham Lincoln’s administration was before my time.
It’s not the proper sex you describe. The Chancellor and his wife have group sex with famous pornographic actors. His wife urinates on his face and he licks up his own semen before dribbling it into his wife’s mouth.
People need to chill. He hasn’t hurt anyone. Yeah, it’s weird, but so what? All lot of people do weird things.
He has spoken about how he thinks this behavior is normal.
Maybe this couple should move to Virginia and run for state senate. Porn is destructive, many of the women in porn are there via extortion, drugs and power.
Porn is destructive. They do it voluntarily. Somehow, it’s what they learned in life. Can you go back in time and improve their parents? Can you change the whole world? Is perfection possible? Hamas was arbitrarily and randomly destructive to the absolutely perfect 23-year-old Israeli hostage Shani Louk. Life is crazy.
Get real, Neil!
Freedom! That’s all anyone can offer. That’s all anyone can provide. Freedom.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
“People Are Crazy”
“God is great, beer is good and people are crazy”
– Billy Currington
Gives new meaning to “an easy A”.
Morality clause
What separates Man from animal in the era of cultural Marxism?
A stump and a cattle prod.
Will almost certainly result in a settlement.
Sure sounds like this could go all the way to the SCOTUS, on 1st Amendment grounds. Of course, without seeing any of the video’s, I could be wrong.
“Gow, 63, and his wife, Carmen Wilson, appear in videos on several porn websites…”
Ewwwwwwww….
@Anon
I second that. To each their own, consenting adults and all that, but – ewwww. People being overly proud of what is a natural biological function are on par with people being proud of other bodily functions in my mind – it may not be ‘wrong’ but it sure is juvenile. People in their 60s taking pride in swapping fluids, a 5 year-old taking pride in gastric disturbances after lunch at Taco Bell – tomato, tomahto. Not interested in watching either of them. 😂
“Universities have historically cracked down on those with unpopular social, political, or religious views. Conservatives and libertarians have long been targeted by such campaigns. We cannot protect some while exempting others from such protections.” JT
Well, that settles it then, out goes the gowho.
“But Shakdi, you are becoming what you hate!”
Nope, the lesson must be learned, and those who have made the rules must be shown their insidious bite ten thousand times more, and quickly, to restore sanity and the American way. Time for justice.
Well, they listened to me, finally.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=Chancellor+Joe+Gow
gowho has been terminated
Oh, I see, my mistake, he was double dipping… a tenured proffs and also univ chancellor, they just cashed in his chance.
Of course they never listen to me. I knew that.
I would say that making your place of employ a laughingstock constitutes reputational harm.
Here is a case where no laws were broken, no cheating between consenting adults.
Curious why some members of Congress (and even presidents) have broken laws and have performed non-consensual sexual acts – but these officials rarely resign.
Although not a fan, Jerry Falwell Jr, should not have resigned as president of his college using this standard when his private affairs with his wife and the pool boy were exposed in the press. Falwell never created a public video.
What’s this world coming to when you can’t moonlight making porn videos with your wife. As they say in Wisconsin, Cripes!
As long as the school informs prospective students that they have professors who moonlight in the porn industry, I see no problem because the student is aware of the school’s reputation and accepts the harm it might do to his job prospects and teach teaching quality.
Now if there had been a Bible in the background….the University would be on safe ground in its actions.
Face it Professor….porking your wife, filming it, and making the video public does harm the credibility, reputation, and image of the University.
Even in these times when Cultural Marxism is undercutting traditional American Values there is a line that even those zealots should not cross.
The Chancellor is free to do that….but society is free to condemn and punish that kind of immorality.
Tenure also has its limits….and should be used for what it was intended…..to protect the tenured person for being dismissed due to published research.
Criminal or Personal violations of a code of conduct can be and should be grounds for termination whether tenured or not.