So much for the party of family values

Started by AllPurposeAtheist, October 02, 2015, 01:02:13 AM

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AllPurposeAtheist

First hooker lady?

QuoteNow that we have a Republican frontrunner who is an infamous serial adulterer and whose current wife once posed nude for a magazine in his private jet, can we say that the GOP’s 35-year masquerade as the party of “family values” is officially over?

Imagine for a moment that photos had emerged of a wife of a past Republican frontrunner â€" Ann Romney or Cindy McCain, for example â€" supine on a fur rug in the altogether. Their husbands’ campaigns would have been over faster than Rick Perry could say “Oops.” But this is Teflon Don, so even evangelicals are apparently okay with what they’d otherwise consider a sinful display.

And then there is the candidate himself. Just 14 years after impeaching Pres. Clinton over a sex lie in civil lawsuit, the Republicans are now giving majority support to a notorious philanderer who openly carried on an affair with wife number two while still married to wife number one, and may have started seeing number three (the one who posed nude) while still married to number two.

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Republicans first began marketing themselves as the party of family values during the 1980 election cycle. Still reeling from the Watergate scandals and Pres. Richard Nixon’s forced resignation, the party sought to shore up its declining registration by doubling down on Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” a ploy to promote party-switching by two inter-related voting blocks â€" evangelicals who were disaffected by the sexual liberation movement and neo-Confederates who were disgusted with the Democrats’ expansions of African-American civil rights

With TV preacher Rev. Jerry Falwell, the GOP stood up the Moral Majority, a well-funded activist organization that blanketed churches with political leaflets espousing the down-home values of Republican candidates, especially including the 1980 GOP nominee. The propaganda push was highly effective. Millions of formerly conservative Democrats who’d rarely bothered to vote in the past changed parties and voted for the Republican nominee.

What these newly minted Republican evangelicals did not know, of course, was that the GOP’s family-values nominee that year had “lived in sin” with his first wife before their marriage and later had married his second wife after he’d gotten her pregnant.

And, yes, that nominee was Ronald Reagan.

It wasn’t just Reagan, of course. It turned out that the ranks of Republican politicians were filled with hypocrites who banged the family-values drum by day and, well, banged people other than their spouses at night.

The hypocrisy reached its zenith in two stages in the mid-1990s. The first stage was the passage in 1996 of DOMA, the Republicans’ Defense of Marriage Act, which was drafted by a serial adulterer, Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, pushed through the House by Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was carrying on an affair with a staffer at the time (current wife Callista) â€" and signed into law by Pres. Clinton at the same time he was having a fling with Monica Lewinsky.

The second stage was Clinton’s impeachment in 1999, during which Gingrich was forced to resign the speakership apparently because of his affair with Callista. It also came to light that key Republican leaders of the impeachment, including both the chairmen of the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, Henry Hyde and Dan Burton, respectively, had had affairs, as had Republican senators who voted to impeach, notably including Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas, an ordained evangelical minister who was sleeping with a staffer when he voted to impeach Clinton for lying about sleeping with a staffer. (Hutchinson’s brother is the current governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson.)

“Family values” is, as everyone knows, just a politically correct way to express bigotry toward gays. Over the past three and a half decades, under the rubric of family values, Republicans have used bigotry toward gays to drive voters to the polls in election after election â€" perhaps most significantly during the 2004 presidential election when Karl Rove mounted an anti-gay campaign in Ohio that many believed made the difference in George W. Bush’s reelection. The party also deployed family values campaigns to convince voters in 35 states to pass anti-gay amendments to their states’ constitutions, all of which were voided by a Supreme Court decision this year.

As a political movement to stop the gay rights cause, the GOP push for family values failed. Acceptance of gay rights actually grew during the family values era. By 2012, it appeared that Republicans had grown tired of the charade, a weariness that was exposed by a burst of support for serial adulterer Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. As columnist Roland Martin wrote at the time, a moment during the January 2012 Republican primary debate in Charleston may have signaled the beginning of the end of GOP’s family-values ruse.

“When the invited audience of 2,300 Republicans stood up and applauded Newt Gingrich’s angry and defiant response to the opening question from CNN’s John King about allegations leveled by the ex-wife of the former speaker of the House,” Martin wrote, “it was clear that the GOP, always judgmental about marital fidelity with Democrats, threw that out of the window.”

Gingrich lost the nomination that year, of course â€" to Mitt Romney, a family-values espousing pol whose Mormon grandfather had five wives.

Now, four years later, the same Bible Belt crowd that cheered Gingrich â€" who had cheated on his cancer-stricken first wife with his future second wife, Marianne, on whom he cheated on with his current wife, Callista â€" is supporting Donald Trump, a millionaire playboy who’s had the sort of romantic career Gingrich could only lust after.
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As the swinging young heir to a New York real-estate fortune, Donald Trump played the field until 1977 when, at age 31, he married Ivana Zelnícková, a Czech immigrant, with whom he had three children. In the mid-1980s Trump began an affair with Marla Maples, a Georgia-born ex-beauty queen. For the next four years, Trump led a double life, essentially maintaining two households, one for his family and the other for his mistress.

These two world collided in 1990 when he took his entire retinue on vacation to Aspen â€" Ivana and the kids in one hotel and Marla in another. Ivana found out, of course, and made a very public scene of the ski slopes. The story was splashed across the tabloids, as was the extremely messy divorce that ensued. In one of Ivana’s depositions, she accused Trump of having raped her after a plastic surgeon she’d recommended had hurt his scalp. After the divorce, Ivana walked away with a multimillion dollar settlement â€" reportedly $20 million in cash, a $14 million estate in Connecticut, $350,000 in alimony annually, among other assets â€" and has since recanted the rape accusation.

By the time Trump married Maples in 1993 he’d become a fixture on the gossip shows and supermarket rags. The couple had a daughter, Tiffany, but the marriage was troubled, and they divorced in June 1999. Trump had already met his current wife, Melania Knauss, a Slovenian fashion model, by then, however. She was 28 and he was 52 when during New York’s Fashion Week in 1998. The relationship went public in 2000 â€" around the time Melania posed nude for British GQ in Trump’s jet. The couple married in 2005, and their son Barron was born in 2006.

The secret to their marriage? “We have incredible sex at least once a day,” Melania revealed early on in an interview with Howard Stern. “Sometimes even more.”

Over the years, Trump has been linked to numerous other women, including the late Texas-born, drug-addicted Playboy model, Anna Nicole Smith; Penthouse model Sandra Taylor; Carla Bruni, the future wife of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy; Scandanavia model Ingrid Seynhaeve; and Jackie Siegel, star of the documentary, “Queen of Versailles.”

According to the right-wing New York Post, Trump also dated future Fox personality Kara Young but dumped her after learning that her mother was African-American.

    Victoria Zdrok, a Ukrainian beauty who posed for Playboy and Penthouse magazines, claims she went on four dates with Trump and told journalist Chaunce Hayden, “He [Trump] would always talk about this one girl, a supermodel, and how he would give her the best orgasms of her life.”

    “He told me he really likes this girl but he would never go out with her because he found out she was half-black,” said Zdrok, according to a transcript in the August issue of Metropolis Nights magazine, “He needed somebody more mainstream.”

Trump’s response was classic: “I never took her [Zdrok] out,” he told a reporter. “It’s total bullshit. She looks like a third-rate hooker.”

Trump also became so fixated on Princess Diana after her divorce that she became alarmed by the unwanted attention. According to British television host Selena Scott, Diana “became increasingly concerned about what she should do. It had begun to feel as if Trump was stalking her.”

Finally, in a bizarre twist on the GOP’s push for family values is a remark the frontrunner made about the one hot young blond he can’t date â€" his daughter, Ivanka.

“[She] does have a very nice figure,” Trump once opined. “I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
http://www.pensitoreview.com/2015/08/25/the-gop-frontrunner-is-a-serial-adulterer-whose-current-wife-posed-nude-is-this-the-end-of-gop-family-values/
All hail my new signature!

Admit it. You're secretly green with envy.

Atheon

Repubelican "family values" is and has always been a joke.
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - Seneca

dtq123

A dark cloud looms over.
Festive cheer does not help much.
What is this, "Justice?"

TomFoolery

I'm not sure if I got this article from here or from a friend on Facebook, but I feel like it belongs here also:

QuoteHard-core in Jesusland: Here’s why red-state conservatives are the biggest smut hounds
Red-state conservatives may insist that the rest of us should keep aspirin between our knees and be forced to bear Divine Justice Babies if we don’t. They may refuse to provide cake or flowers for gay weddings, or even to attend. They may pretend that teens won’t do it if we just don’t tell them how. They may adopt the Church Lady posture if anyone mentions sex that doesn’t involve one man, one woman, the missionary position and a pulsing desire for more offspring.

But online search traffic from behind closed doors in Jesusland suggests that the bad, nasty, sexual impulses righteous believers are trying so hard to shut down may be their own. And if Google search patterns mean anything, they’re not succeeding too well: studies consistently demonstrate that people in conservative religious states search for adult materials online far more often than people in blue states.

Ever since Freud first started publishing his theories, psychologists have had a fascination with what he called “defense mechanisms“:

Denial means simply refusing to acknowledge that some event or pattern is real.

Repression involves pushing uncomfortable thoughts and feelings to the far recesses of the subconscious mind.
Reaction formation is saying or doing the opposite of what you really want but won’t allow yourself to express.
Projection means assuming that others share the impulses, feelings, and vices that you find unacceptable in yourself.
Freud had a lot of ideas that haven’t withstood the test of time or the scientific method, but defense mechanisms have stuck, in part because they are so useful for explaining some of humanities’ more bizarre behaviors. Like, perhaps, the conservative obsession with controlling everyone else’s sexual behavior.

For almost two centuries, what happened in the Bible Belt, sexually at least, stayed in the Bible Belt. Oh sure, there was the odd scandal involving a small-town preacher and the pretty young wife of a deacon or youth minister, or a big-name televangelist who, for example, asked male followers to get vasectomies and then examined their swollen willies. And there were the shocking-shocking-I-tell-you revelations of evangelical leaders feeling up young female interns or paying male call boys or even behaving like Catholic priests. But most people, for some reason, have had a hard time considering the possibility that there might be a pattern of correlation between authoritarian religion, sexual repression, and sneaky sex.

Enter the Internet, where everything is secretâ€"or not.

Whatever You Have Said in the Dark Will Be Heard in the Light â€"Luke 12:3

In October, two Toronto researchers, Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson, published a study in which they used Google Trends to analyze porn searches. Individual search records are protected by privacy laws, but it is possible to compare the popularity of search terms across various regions or states, which is what they did.

Specifically, MacInnis and Hodson linked state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms. Their study design involves a number of different comparisons and it considered the effects of other variables like poverty and population. Based on related research, they hypothesized that states with higher levels of religiosity and conservatism would have higher rates of search for sexual content.

They made this prediction, and the data bore it out. More religiosity and conservatism meant more searches on words like sex, gay sex, gay porn, or sex images.

MacInnis and Hodson caution that aggregate data can’t be used to draw conclusions about individuals. Also, their research is open to alternative interpretations: Maybe lonely liberals in red states are the ones searching for erotica online. But their findings are in keeping with information from other sources: Business professor Benjamin Edelman at Harvard found that states with more traditional views of sex and gender have higher rates of paid porn subscriptionsâ€"meaning people who are willing to put porn on a credit card.

Strip club owners claim they make three times as much during Republican conventions as Democratic conventions or even the Superbowl. MacInnis and Hodson quote exotic dancer Layla Love who in 2001 said, “Since the RNC has started, I have actually started to do 15 to 17 hour shifts, every day, until the convention is over. So, for basically seven days straight, I will be in the club, every day, day shift and night shift.”

Preach What You Practice

One can almost picture a group of Values Voters at the convention after a night on the town:

Projection: Godless liberals are destroying this countryâ€"feminazi sluts demanding sex with no consequences and faggots pushing their gay agenda on our children.

Repression: What?

Reaction formation: This town is full of trashy dancers who wag their big tits and tight asses at honest businessmen. We should lock them up and throw away the key.

Repression: What?

Denial: Real Christians, through prayer, have the power to resist temptation. Only righteous men in public office can stop the moral decay of this sex-obsessed country.

Repression: Did you say something?

The honest truth is that we all have our failings, Christian or not, liberal or conservative. None of us live up to our best intentions or deepest values. What’s shameful is not the fact that people find sex arousing and seek it out, even when they feel compelled to do so on the sneak. The problem is hypocrisy and the way that it distorts public policies and parenting, causing real harm to real people. For over a decade, conservatives forced abstinence-only education on young people, insisting that hormone-ravaged teens could “just say no” when they themselves can’t.

This epic public health failure contributed to the United States having the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, with devastating economic consequences for young mothers and their offspring. Some thrive despite the odds; many do not. We can do better.

Denying young people information about their bodies doesn’t stop them from having sex. We know that. What it does is create a fog zone, a “haze of misperceptions, magical thinking and ambivalence” that puts teens at risk for sexually transmitted infections and surprise pregnancy. Teens are notorious risk takers. The army sends recruiters into high schools because at age 17 or 18 kids think bad things happen only to other people. Or they simply don’t think. Cognitive scientists tell us that the frontal lobe doesn’t develop fully until the early 20s.

Add to that a conservative, paternalistic “virginity code” that traces back to ancient times, layering shame, denial and secrecy around sexual exploration. Religious and cultural codes prizing virginity may once have helped to ensure that children were born only when parents could provide for them. But in today’s world, an antiquated purity myth can actually have the opposite effect. To kids who are earnestly trying to live by the spoken rules, planful, protected, “premeditated” sex may feel like a worse transgression than a high-risk encounter that erupts in the heat of passion. Young people who have prepared to be safe may get treated as if they were on the make. James Houston’s documentary film, Let’s Talk About Sex, contrasts American and Dutch youth in this regard. What do you think of someone who carries a condom? the filmmaker asks. Teens from the two cultures give opposite responses.

American men, women, and yes, children need honest conversation about the world we actually live in, not some pretense or fantasy about how we think the world should work. We need policies that are grounded in evidence and that recognize the awkward, complicated and sometimes embarrassing reality of what it means to be human. And that includes the fact that most of us really, really like sex.
How can you be sure my refusal to agree with your claim a symptom of my ignorance and not yours?

Solitary

I'm starting to think I belong to the wrong political party.  :06: :1rij: :57:
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Shiranu

Trump is dropping in the polls like a rock lately (...and here comes Ben Carson...) so I am not really sure you can say he was the rontrunner. I mean, it's not even 2016 yet... trying to igure out who is the likely candidate at this early o time is absolutely pointless.
"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur