Republican Hipocrisy, Part 2

There has been another outbreak of sexual hypocrisy the the Republican right...

Here is an article in Vanity Fair by Avi Zenilman about Mark Souder, a Republican Congressman from Indiana, famous for being a staunch advocate of abstinence education and family values:

Politico is reporting that longtime Indiana congressman Mark Souder, a socially conservative Republican who railed against consensual sex outside of marriage, is resigning because he had an affair with a female aide. He is a married father of three.

Oops. Souder frequently meddled with CDC research into at-risk behavior, and made life difficult for medical researchers of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. For example, in March 2004, Souder hauled Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, a former C.D.C. officer and S.T.D. specialist at Hopkins who happens to be my father, before his committee and proceeded to lecture him on the sins of condoms and sex outside of wedlock and its liberal enablers.

This story is right up there with the George Alan Rekers scandal. Rekers is a Christian minister, a founding board member of the Family Research Council (a non-profit Christian lobbying organization) along with James Dobson and Armand Nicholi Jr., and he is a former officer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization offering conversion therapy intended to change homosexuals into heterosexuals, from Wikipedia:

The Miami New Times reported on May 4, 2010 that three weeks previously, Rekers had been photographed at Miami International Airport with a twenty-year-old "rent boy" using the name "Lucien" (later identified as Jo-Vanni Roman). Roman was available for hire through the "Rentboy.com" website. Rekers acknowledged hiring Roman for the 10-day European vacation as a "travel assistant" and denies any impropriety. He explained that Roman was there to help carry his luggage since he had recent surgery and was unable to carry it himself. Rekers was quoted as commenting, "If you talk with my travel assistant ... you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail."

Here is the way that Maureen Dowd puts it in her NY Times op-ed column:

... the resignation of Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana, a goober who preaches sex-abstinence and couldn’t abstain from sex.

The conservative Christian lawmaker is both morally and physically repellent. But he effortlessly benefits from Henry Kissinger’s dictum about power being an aphrodisiac. He had an affair with a younger babe who worked for his district office — “part time,” he ludicrously stressed. They had assignations in state parks and boat launches, and in a particularly delicious bit of hypocrisy, the pretty mistress even interviewed him on a promotional video about the importance of abstinence.

Another case of a family-values politician thinking he knows what’s good for everybody else but exempting himself.

These Republican "pillars of the community" are excellent at the ethics of "do what I say, not what I do". Or, better put, at hypocrisy.