Friday, March 09, 2018

this never gets old

Ohio state legislator Wes Goodman turns out not to be a very good man. The married Republican official, who has crusaded against LGBT rights and gay marriage, was recently caught having sex with a man in his office. Goodman has since resigned.

An Ohio lawmaker who routinely touted his Christian faith and anti-LGBT views has resigned after being caught having sex with a man in his office.

Wes Goodman, who is the Republican state legislator for Ohio, is married to a woman who is assistant director of an annual anti-abortion rally known as March for Life.

The right-wing legislator, who pushed “family values”, was reportedly witnessed having sex with a man inside his office who was not employed by the legislator.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, the observer told Ohio House Chief of Staff Mike Dittoe what had happened on Tuesday afternoon. Mr Dittoe responded by telling House Speaker Republican Cliff Rosenberger who in turn met with Mr Goodman.

The 33-year-old, who has been branded the “conscience of the conservative movement”, resigned for “inappropriate conduct” shortly after the meeting took place.

Mr Goodman, whose Twitter biography describes him as “Christian. American. Conservative. Republican. Husband to @Beth1027”, has regularly claimed "natural marriage" occurs between a man and a woman.

"Healthy, vibrant, thriving, values-driven families are the source of Ohio's proud history and the key to Ohio's future greatness,” reads his campaign website, which has now been taken offline.

Haw haw. This shit keeps happening. Remember Ted Haggard?

It's enough to make me think that the old argument that homophobes are secretly gay may have merit. (I tend to think that that notion is a distant cousin of the "he who smelt it dealt it" argument: the guiltiest are the loudest accusers.)



2 comments:

Charles said...

I almost made a quick, pithy comment on this after you first posted it, but I did not. Instead, I decided to think about it a bit.

It does indeed seem quite ironic, not to mention hypocritical, that these steadfast and vocal defenders of "Christian values" often seem to turn out to be secretly gay. (Of course, we naturally tend to notice these examples more than we do those anti-gay crusaders who do not turn out to be gay; it would be interested to see statistics on this, but I imagine that those statistics would be hard to gather.)

If you are raised to believe that homosexuality is a sin against God, a perversion of nature, etc., and you have fully internalized these views, then it does make a perverse sort of sense that you would come out strongly against homosexuality. By attacking homosexuality and championing the values you have been raised to believe are good and true, maybe you can purge yourself of your evil desires. If those desires remain despite your best efforts to deny them, it is likely that you will only become more vocal in your opposition of them.

This is why I do not believe this phenomenon to be even a distant cousin of the "he who smelt it dealt it" phenomenon. If you boil HWSIDI down to its basic principle, it is an attempt to distract attention from your own shortcomings by attributing those shortcomings to others. However, the others who are being blamed here are in fact blameless. In the case at hand, though, the accused are indeed guilty of what the homophobe is accusing them. It is less a case of trying to distract attention from oneself than it is an externalization of the fear, hatred, and disgust that one feels for oneself. In short, it comes from a place of self loathing.

There is a solution to the problem, although the people who suffer from the problem are not likely to take to it: Cast away judgment and learn to love yourself as a starting point for loving others. But that would mean leaving judgment up to God and accepting our role on this earth as one of loving others, which seems to be something that many in the Church struggle with--even though that's precisely what Jesus told us to do.

Kevin Kim said...

"it is an attempt to distract attention from your own shortcomings by attributing those shortcomings to others. However, the others who are being blamed here are in fact blameless."

True, but let's say you're a homophobe on a witch hunt who's accusing others, based on little evidence, of being homosexual. Some of those accused will be "innocent" of the accusation of homosexuality. There are plenty of examples in history, I think, of people attempting to "out" those they think are gay. Among those examples are, quite likely, many false accusations.

"It is less a case of trying to distract attention from oneself than it is an externalization of the fear, hatred, and disgust that one feels for oneself. In short, it comes from a place of self loathing."

I agree with the self-loathing bit (which may also be true, by the way, of the guy who farts in an elevator: at the very least, he's motivated by guilt), but I'm not completely on board with the idea that this is "less" a case of trying to distract. I think one of the main points of such virtue signaling (Ted Haggard again) is to proclaim loudly that "I am decidedly not X." In other words: "hey, don't look at me."

So while I concede there might be some disanalogies between "he who smelt it dealt it" and the virtue-signaling homophobe crowd, I'd still say there's a sort of virtue-signaling that the two demographics have in common, thus making them distant cousins. In both cases, there's guilt or self-hatred motivating a need to distract people away from oneself. And in both cases, the attempt at accusation might fall on both the similarly guilty or the innocent. (Re: "similarly guilty": I can imagine a scenario in which two guys simultaneously fart in a crowded elevator, and only one guy makes an outcry, such that the accusatory question "Who farted?" does, in fact, successfully [albeit inadvertently] target another guilty party.)