Typical Hypocrits - America's Greedy Religious Right And Their Rapist Ways - From Politicians To Ministers

[Jeff Ballingall]

Post-1970s Republicans, all too often, have been
self-righteous, preachy, overbearing, holier-than-thou witch
hunters—and in many cases, the ones who screamed the loudest
about how godly they were turned out to be the exact
opposite. Below are 20 of the top socially conservative
hypocrites of the Religious Right.

1. Jimmy Swaggart

Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who is a cousin of
rock-and-roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis and country singer
Mickey Gilley, was preaching fire-and-brimstone Christian
fundamentalism before the 1980s; his television program
started in 1975. But it was during the 1980s that Swaggart
rose to prominence in right-wing politics and, along with
Rev. Jerry Falwell, Rev. James Robison and Rev. Pat
Robertson, greatly influenced the Christian Right’s influence
on the GOP. Swaggart’s sermons are as political as they are
religious, and he has never been shy about describing
feminists, liberals, Democrats and rock musicians as agents
of Satan who promote immorality at every turn. But in 1988,
it was revealed that the adulterous Swaggart had been
cheating on his wife with a New Orleans prostitute named
Debra Murphree. And his association with prostitutes did not
end after his famous “I have sinned” speech of 1988. In 1991,
Swaggart was with prostitute Rosemary Garcia when he was
pulled over by the California Highway Patrol; Garcia said
Swaggart had asked her for sex. On top of all that, Swaggart
has admitted to having a long history of porn consumption
(even though he has often called for tougher enforcement of
obscenity laws). And he appears to have dabbled in something
else Christian fundamentalists condemn: BDSM. In a 1989
Penthouseinterview, a woman named Catherine Campen said that
when she was having an affair with Swaggart, he asked her to
beat him with a riding crop.

2. Laura Schlessinger

Although America’s Religious Right has been dominated by
Protestant fundamentalists, not all far-right culture
warriors are Pentecostals or Southern Baptists. For example,
talk radio host Laura Schlessinger, a.k.a. Dr. Laura, was a
convert to Orthodox Judaism (before renouncing it in 2003),
and she has made a career out of railing against sex
education, abortion, premarital sex, porn, feminism and
homosexuality (the gay-bashing Schlessinger once said that “a
huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on
young boys”). But for all her moralizing, Schlessinger hasn’t
always acted like a Puritan; in the late 1990s, some nude and
topless photos she had posed for in the mid-1970s were
published on the Internet. The photos were taken by the late
radio shock-jock Bill Balance, who sold them to an adult Web
site. Schlessinger filed a lawsuit for invasion of privacy
and copyright infringement, but a court ruled that the photos
were not her intellectual property. Schlessinger’s “queen of
family values” routine is also laughable considering that
when her mother died in 2002, it was widely reported that Dr.
Laura hadn’t spoken to her since 1986.

3. Newt Gingrich

In 1998, President Bill Clinton was lambasted by a long list
of Republicans when it was revealed that he had cheated on
his wife, Hillary Clinton, with intern Monica Lewinsky. One
of his loudest critics was House of Representatives Speaker
Newt Gingrich (who asserted that Clinton showed “a level of
disrespect and decadence that should appall every American”).
But while Gingrich was lambasting Clinton for committing
adultery and trying to get him impeached, he was also
cheating on his second wife, Marianne Ginther, with a woman
(Callista Bisek, who became his third wife) who was 20 years
younger. And that wasn’t the first time Gingrich committed
adultery. In the early 1980s, Gingrich cheated on his first
wife, Jackie Battley, with Ginther—and when Battley was in
the hospital recovering from cancer surgery, Gingrich
insisted on discussing the terms of their divorce. After
that, Mr. Family Values refused to pay Battley either alimony
or child support (a local church took up a collection to help
her out financially). Despite his history of serial adultery,
Gingrich had no problem playing the “family values” card
during his recent bid for the GOP presidential nomination.

4. David Vitter

Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana is infamous for his extreme
social conservatism and for pandering to the Christian Right.
Vitter has supported a constitutional amendment that would
ban gay marriage nationwide (although he claims to support
“states rights,” Vitter makes an exception when it comes to
gay marriage), promoted abstinence-only sex education, called
for school board meetings in Louisiana to open with prayers,
and repeatedly preached against abortion. Vitter loves to
play the red state/blue state card, saying that he represents
socially conservative “Louisiana values” rather than secular
“Massachusetts values.” But in 2007, it was revealed that
Vitter had been a client of the Washington, DC escort service
operated by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, a.k.a. the DC Madam;
Vitter admitted he had cheated on his wife with a prostitute,
but no criminal charges were filed because of the statute of
limitations. Despite his blatant hypocrisy, Vitter was
re-elected to the Senate in 2010.

5. Rush Limbaugh

“The Rush Limbaugh Show” has always been full of sexual
contradictions. On one hand, the far-right talk radio host
has a long history of supporting the Christian Right and
telling his audience that the Republican Party is the true
voice of morality in the United States. On the other hand,
the twice-divorced Limbaugh is quite fond of off-color humor
(“PMSNBC” is his name for MSNBC) and sexual innuendos.
Limbaugh will use sex to boost ratings at the same time he’s
preaching God, family values and morality to the GOP base.
Limbaugh’s schizophrenic relationship with sex was recently
exemplified by his heavily publicized attack on Georgetown
University law student Sandra Fluke, whom he denounced as a
“slut” and a “prostitute” for saying that health insurance
plans should cover female contraception. Limbaugh said that
if other people were going to pay for Fluke to have sex, she
should film the sexual act for his viewing pleasure. In other
words, he was asking Fluke to make a porn video, which is
ironic in light of how much time Republicans have spent
railing against the adult entertainment industry. Limbaugh’s
hypocrisy doesn’t end there; previous Limbaugh scandals have
ranged from his well-documented addiction to painkillers in
2003 to being detained for three hours at the Palm Beach
Airport in 2006 for possessing a bottle of Viagra that wasn’t
in his name.

6. Larry Craig

During the many years he spent in Congress (18 years in the
Senate preceded by 10 years in the House of Representatives),
Republican Larry Craig of Idaho was a strident social
conservative with a very anti-gay record. Craig opposed gay
men serving in the U.S. military, and he favored adding an
amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have outlawed
same-sex marriage nationwide. The Human Rights Campaign, an
LGBT advocacy group that rates politicians’ voting records on
gay issues, gave Craig a rating of 0 in 2004. But in June
2007, the married Craig was arrested for lewd conduct in a
men’s room stall at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International
Airport; an undercover police officer said that Craig’s
behavior indicated he was seeking a sexual encounter (Craig
pled guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct). And in
December 2007, no less than eight gay men alleged to the
Idaho Statesman that they had either had sexual affairs with
Craig or that he had made sexual advances to them.

7. Ted Haggard

Evangelical minister Ted Haggard has never been known for
embracing a moderate approach to Protestant Christianity.
Very much a fundamentalist, Haggard was a strong supporter of
George W. Bush’s presidency and did a lot to rally GOP
“values voters” in 2004. Haggard has been quite the culture
warrior, loudly preaching against abortion, premarital sex,
adultery and gay marriage. But in 2006, a male escort named
Mike Jones revealed that the married Haggard had been a
client; in addition to paying for sex and committing
adultery, Jones said, Haggard was fond of using crystal meth.
Admitting to his followers that he was guilty of “sexual
immorality,” Jones resigned from his position with the
National Association of Evangelicals.

8. Henry Hyde

Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones, but
the late Illinois Republican Henry Hyde (who spent 32 years
in the House of Representatives and died in 2007) threw
plenty of stones (figuratively speaking) during the
impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton. Clinton, Hyde
insisted, had disgraced the presidency by committing adultery
and lying about it under oath. But it turned out that Hyde
had his own history of adultery. In the 1960s, Hyde was
married with four sons when he had an affair with a woman
named Cherie Snodgrass, who had three children with Fred
Snodgrass, her husband at the time. In a 1998 interview with
Salon.com, Fred Snodgrass denounced Hyde as a “hypocrite who
broke up my family.” Hyde described his affair with Cherie as
a “youthful indiscretion,” although he was 41 when the affair
started.

9. Jim Bakker

Jimmy Swaggart was not the first right-wing Pentecostal
televangelist to be involved in a major sex scandal. In 1987,
Jim Bakker (who co-hosted “The PTL Club” with his wife, Tammy
Faye Bakker) was disgraced when it came out that he had
cheated on his wife with church secretary Jessica Hahn and
paid her $265,000 to keep quiet. In 1989, Bakker was
convicted of fraud and racketeering charges in a federal
court and sentenced to 45 years in prison and a $500,000
fine, but he was granted parole in 1994. Swaggart,
ironically, was vehemently critical of Bakker in 1987,
calling him “a cancer on the body of Christ” because of his
affair with Hahn—and all the while, Swaggart was every bit
the adulterer himself.

10. James West

The late Republican James West, who died in 2006, was a
champion of anti-gay causes during his years in Washington
State politics (first in the Washington State senate, then as
mayor of Spokane). West promoted, among other things, a
blatantly discriminatory bill that would have prohibited gay
men and women from working for schools, daycare centers and
certain state agencies. But in 2004, West was caught in a sex
scandal when the Spokane Spokesman-Review conducted a sting
operation and alleged that West, in a gay online chat room,
offered a possible City Hall internship to someone he thought
was an 18-year-old man (in reality, the “18-year-old” was a
private investigator hired by the Spokesman-Review). The
Spokane County Republican Party called for West’s
resignation, and in 2005, he lost his position as mayor when
voters opted to recall him.

11. John Ensign

During the years he represented Nevada in the U.S. Senate
(and before that, the House of Representatives), Republican
John Ensign was held in high regard by the Christian
Coalition, Focus on the Family and other Christian Right
theocrats. Staunchly anti-abortion, he was a Pentecostal who
considered himself “born again.” He voted in favor of a
constitutional ban on gay marriage, and he was active in the
Promise Keepers. The Christian Coalition gave him a 100%
rating in 2003, while the Human Rights Campaign gave him a
rating of only 11% in 2006. Like many other Republicans,
Ensign called for Bill Clinton’s resignation in 1998, saying
that an adulterer was unfit to be president. But as much as
Ensign liked to talk about the sanctity of marriage, he
didn’t practice what he preached; Ensign ended up resigning
from the Senate in 2011 because of the scandal surrounding
his adulterous affair with Cynthia Hampton, the wife of
Douglas Hampton, an administrative aid in Ensign’s office and
a close personal friend.

12. Michael D. Duvall

As a member of the California State Assembly, Republican
Michael D. Duvall had a reputation for being an outspoken
social conservative. Duvall opposed abortion as much as he
opposed gay marriage, and he insisted that heterosexual
marriage had to be protected because it was the backbone of
America. But in 2009, Duvall not only admitted to cheating on
his wife, he bragged about it. During a lull in an
appropriations committee meeting, Duvall told fellow
California State Assembly member Jeff Miller that he had been
cheating on his wife with two different women (one of them a
lobbyist). Duvall didn’t realize that a microphone was
picking up the conversation, and his comments, some of which
were quite graphic, became a matter of public record. For
someone who loved to paint himself as a staunch moralist,
Duvall certainly took a great deal of pride in committing
adultery. Duvall resigned from the California State Assembly
the day after the story broke.

13. Bob Allen

Like James West and Larry Craig, Bob Allen is among the
Republican politicians who has a history of being anti-gay
but ended up in a gay sex scandal. Allen supported a lot of
anti-gay legislation during the seven years he spent in the
Florida House of Representatives. In July 2007, Allen was
arrested after offering to pay an undercover police officer
$20 if he could perform oral sex on him in the public
restroom where they met. Found guilty of solicitation for
prostitution, Allen didn’t serve any jail time, but was
sentenced to six months probation and fined $250. Allen
resigned from the Florida House of Representatives shortly
after that.

14. Tony Alamo

In the 1970s, evangelist/cult leader Tony Alamo, a.k.a.
Bernie Lazar Hoffman and his wife Susan made a name for
themselves in evangelical circles preaching a far-right
version of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism. But in the
'80s, Alamo’s behavior became so bizarre that much of the
Christian Right distanced itself from him. After his wife’s
death from cancer in 1982, Alamo put her embalmed body on
display for months and insisted that when his congregation
raised her from the dead, she would tell them when Jesus
Christ would return to Earth. Also around that time Alamo
began publishing his conspiracy theories involving the
Catholic Church (which he considered “the Great Whore of
Babylon” and believed was controlling the Soviet Union,
Islamic terrorists and the Reagan Administration all at the
same time). Initially, Alamo was a Ronald Reagan supporter,
although he turned against Reagan when he decided that his
administration was pro-Vatican. The worst, however, was yet
to come. In 2009, Alamo was sentenced to 175 years in prison
on a long list of charges that included sexual abuse and
transporting underage girls across state lines for sexual
purposes. Alamo’s ex-followers testified in court that he was
guilty of numerous acts of pedophilia, including taking an
eight-year-old girl to be his “wife” and having sex with her.
Despite a mountain of damning evidence, the sociopathic Alamo
has maintained that he is innocent of all the charges he was
convicted of and insists that he was framed by the Vatican.

15. Bob Livingston

When numerous Republicans were attacking Bill Clinton in
1998, porn tycoon Larry Flynt was anxious to expose their
hypocrisy and offered $1 million to anyone who could prove
that a Republican member of Congress was committing adultery.
Flynt obtained concrete proof that Rep. Bob Livingston of
Louisiana had cheated on his wife numerous times. Livingston
was among the many Republicans who had demanded Clinton’s
resignation over the Lewinsky scandal, and Flynt was happy to
show the public that the Louisiana congressman was very much
an adulterer himself. Livingston, who probably would have
replaced Gingrich as speaker of House of Representatives had
it not been for that sex scandal, resigned from the House.

16. Mark Sanford

These days, the Christian Right has so much influence in the
Republican Party that it is next to impossible to become the
Republican governor of a southern Bible Belt state if one
isn’t a social conservative. Mark Sanford had a socially
conservative record during his years as governor of South
Carolina (he was elected in 2002) and before that, a member
of the House of Representatives. He opposed abortion and gay
marriage, voted to impeach Bill Clinton, and described
Clinton’s actions during the Lewinsky scandal as
“reprehensible.” Sanford, however, became involved in a
scandal of his own when, in 2009, it was revealed that he had
been cheating on his wife with a woman from Argentina named
María Belén Chapur (whom he had met in Uruguay in 2001).
Sanford was censured by the South Carolina House Judiciary
Committee for his misuse of state travel funds.

17. Lou Beres

Lou Beres is the former head of the Oregon Christian
Coalition as well as the former chairman of the Multnomah
County Republican Party. In 2005, when he was 70, Beres
confessed to police that he had a history of sexually
molesting adolescent girls, including his sister-in-law
Elizabeth Jonas in the 1960s and two friends of his daughters
in the 1970s. Because the crimes occurred so long ago, Beres
wasn’t facing any criminal charges; Jonas was in her 50s when
she came forward. But a civil lawsuit was filed against
Beres, and Jonas was seeking $2 million in damages.

18. Mark Foley

Florida Republican Mark Foley served in the House of
Representatives from 1995-2006, during which time he had a
reputation for being socially conservative even though he
wasn’t quite as conservative as some of his fellow
Republicans would have liked. In 2003, Foley received an 84%
rating from the Christian Coalition, which was lower than the
100% rating John Ensign received that year but much higher
than most Democrats typically received from that
organization. And his voting record was generally anti-gay,
which was ironic in view of the fact that, in 2006, he got
caught up in a gay sex scandal involving teenage male
congressional pages. Foley, who had been sending the pages
sexually explicit emails, resigned from Congress.

19. Roy Ashburn

Republican Roy Ashburn had a very anti-gay voting record when
he served in the California State Senate from 2002-2010; he
organized rallies opposing gay marriage, and he voted against
having a day in remembrance of the slain gay rights leader
Harvey Milk. In 2010, however, Ashburn was arrested for DUI
after leaving a gay nightclub in Sacramento. Ashburn
announced that he was gay, and gay activists pointed to his
anti-gay voting record as a classic example of self-hatred.

20. Rev. Michael Hintz

When George W. Bush was running for re-election in 2004, Rev.
Michael Hintz (a youth counselor at the First Assembly of God
Church in Des Moines, Iowa) asserted that re-electing Bush
was the Christian thing to do. The United States, Hintz said,
was in the middle of a major culture war, and the country
needed a man of God in the White House who would fight
against abortion and porn. But it was also in 2004 that Hintz
(who was 35 and married with four kids at the time) was fired
by the First Assembly of God Church for becoming sexually
involved with a 17-year-old girl he had been counseling."