Sex Scandals and Conservatives
Oppression and Deviant Behaviors
Before we get started, let me say upfront that this piece may be too sexually explicit for some. Please feel free to scroll on by if talk about sex makes you feel uncomfortable. I’m a seventy-four-year-old grandmother, and frankly, I think that open conversations about such a central theme to all living creatures need to be explored.
So, here we go…
Let’s begin with a bit of news, shall we? This happens to be old news, but it’s a good starting point. Remember Matt Gaetz? The House Ethics Committee released a detailed report alleging that Matt Gaetz made multiple payments for sex and used drugs like cocaine and marijuana. I expect no one was truly surprised, but in many cases, these reports are not shared with the public after the person being investigated resigns from their appointed position. In this case, with much deliberation, the report was released anyway. But as I already said, no one should have been surprised.
Now, I’m not really here to spend time talking about Mr. Gaetz. Matt didn’t fare so well, but others have gone on to fill positions of power that were no better, maybe worse than him. He’s just one of many men who has enjoyed special privileges while indulging in pastimes that some Americans consider unlawful and immoral. Nobody is surprised that men in positions of power give themselves permission to do whatever they please. That kind of behavior is as old as the hills, dating back centuries. What is galling is the blatant hypocrisy. After all, the Republican Party has built an entire political message around protecting the traditional family, bringing Christianity back into the schools, and rejecting what they’ve determined to be deviant behavior in order to make America great again. Yet, they are constantly misbehaving in the worst possible manner in their private lives.
What ails these folks?
In all fairness, this is not a new behavior in America. My personal experiences have backed up what I have suspected is a common human behavior. I grew up in a religious cult. Two things were pounded into my head from the time I was a little girl: one, I must serve God or I would go to hell when I died; and two, I must remain a virgin until I am married. So much emphasis was placed on my virginity that sometimes little else seemed to matter. My father’s far-right cult was obsessed with oppressing girls. The fear that one day I might touch a boy’s hand, which could lead to sexual activity, was palpable. After all the trouble they went to by covering our bodies, literally from head to toe, and controlling our very thoughts, my father molested me and my sister. It would have been so much better for me if I’d just held that boy’s hand.
Turns out that kind of behavior is par for the course.
Whether it’s a priest sending a young girl to a home for unwed mothers as a form of punishment but then turning around and molesting choir boys, or an evangelical minister preaching hellfire and brimstone from the pulpit while molesting his own daughters, they can’t seem to control their own impulses.
Why?
Why are those who see it as their job to control others often unable to suppress their own deviant behaviors? Is there a connection between this self-righteous, unrelenting drive to repress others and their lack of personal control over their own sexual needs?
Unfortunately, the religious and the conservative party are intertwined these days.
They tend to believe in repression and oppression rather than bodily freedom and education. So, they oppose sex education in schools and free birth control. They also disapprove of the rights of the LGBTQ community to love who they want. They encourage abstinence, and any sexual activities outside the norm of one woman and one man gratifying one another are off-limits. They rabidly pursue legislation that promotes controlling the personal choices of others. They get to decide what you can do in the privacy of your own home, and they’re ready to persecute and punish if you disobey.
And then they turn around and give themselves permission to not just have sex but to play around with socially forbidden sexual expectations.
Take the Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, who admitted to participating in threesomes with her husband and another woman. If you haven’t heard about this embarrassing headline, here’s the story: once again, Bridget spends endless hours trying to decide what other people can and can’t do, and then we discover that she and her husband are doing whatever they please. Don’t you just love it?! That was a sarcastic question. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.
I get it, though — probably better than most. My life until I was 18 years old was spent in a Christian cult where the leaders oppressed their children and followers but were often themselves guilty of incest and other deeply disturbing behaviors. I’ve concluded that there must be a psychological element to these behaviors: the more a person is obsessed with controlling the behavior of others, the more likely they are to be guilty of doing the very things that they are forbidding.
Humans! You can’t make this stuff up.
I can’t end this article without mentioning the absurd obsession the far right has with preserving the American family when their fearless leader has been divorced twice, married three times, and cheated on all of his wives, including cheating on Melania while she was pregnant. And we mustn’t forget that between the 47th president and the richest man in the world, they’ve fathered 17 children by six different women. Going for the WIN!
“Let’s make more babies,” Elon dictates.
I’ve lived and traveled all over the world. One of my trips involved a day on the Isle of Capri, where the Emperor Tiberius had twelve summer villas. Twelve! A single summer villa wasn’t enough for an emperor, apparently. I only saw the remains of one of them. Tiberius was very extravagant — wealthy and privileged beyond what most could even imagine.
One man with too much power and money is never a good idea.
It has been surmised that he and his close buddies often held wild parties on the island. They’d drink, eat, and engage in promiscuous behavior. Some historians even suggest that Tiberius had sexual relations with children. Sound familiar? I guess the Roman Empire and Jeffrey Epstein had a lot in common. No one will ever know for sure how many people Tiberius hurt with his insatiable need for power and excess, just as we may never know who was on Epstein’s list of regulars. We can be sure that Tiberius was a loathsome leader and that there were many loathsome leaders who followed him. Our history books are filled with the stories of psychopaths in power.
Ugh! How do people continue to fall for these shysters, even today? I’ll never understand it, except for one thing: religious and political leaders often attract sociopaths and psychopaths — individuals who crave power and will lord it over the masses while breaking all the rules they demand the rest of us follow. Even in a democracy and the Age of Information, the people put them in power.
These days, the people are just as much to blame as the psychopaths.
We can’t unite and use our power. Instead, we help put people in power who are corrupt. They have lots of money and priviledge while the rest of us must follow their rules without question. They are above the law, however. Yet, we don’t, or maybe we can’t, learn from history. At this stage of the game, you’ve got to wonder if there’s any hope for humanity at all.
I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
Teresa is an author and a professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
