Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (25 page)

To Vitter, there was not a single issue more important than amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriages. Not a single one.
That
is the most important issue there is in the United States. Whatever one’s views are on same-sex marriages and the like, just imagine the internal universe of a person who seriously believes banning them is the Most Important Issue in the United States.

Same-sex marriages are, to Vitter, no different from natural disasters that destroy the lives of thousands of his constituents. As the Human Rights Campaign reported:

Louisiana Senator David Vitter, speaking at a Lafayette Parish Republican Executive Committee luncheon, referred to hurricanes Katrina and Rita coming through the same areas as a same-sex marriage.

In his statements at the luncheon, Vitter referred to the impact of both hurricanes on the Lafayette area. “Unfortunately, it’s the crossroads where Katrina meets Rita,” said Vitter. “I always knew I was against same-sex unions.”

Vitter’s moral center is not something he developed only recently. No. It is rock solid, something he “always knew.” Once the amendment failed to pass, Vitter solemnly observed:

Eventually, Congress is going to have to catch up to the wisdom of the American people or the American people will change Congress for the better.

Senator David Vitter, Fighter for the Moral Wisdom of the American People. The Religious Freedom Coalition declared about Vitter in December 2003, when he announced he was running for the Senate:

A good friend of social conservatives, Republican Congressman David Vitter of Louisiana has announced he will run for the seat being vacated by Senator Breaux. Congressman Vitter is pro-life and a
true social conservative.

Vitter’s desire to use the law to impose his rock-solid traditional morality is not confined to marriage. Proclaimed the Religious Freedom Coalition: In general, Vitter “[was] one of the most conservative Republicans in the House,” as he also “loathes gambling and rarely votes against his party or the president.” (Vitter’s deeply moral opposition to gambling may be as authentic as his commitment to traditional marriage: His anti-gambling crusades were fueled in part by some Jack Abramoff money designed to attack certain gaming interests in order to help Abramoff’s other gambling casino clients.)

When Vitter was elected to the Senate, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family celebrated his victory in its newsletter to its members, announcing: “David Vitter, the Christian Conservative, became the first Republican to win a Louisiana Senate seat since Reconstruction.”

And as with so many of the pious stalwarts of the Republican Party, Vitter injected his personal life into his campaign by parading around as the Wholesome Man of Family Values, a real salt-of-the-earth moralist. One of the most revealing stories ever written about Vitter was a lengthy profile by Mary Jacoby in
Salon
when Vitter’s election to the Senate in 2004 appeared certain:

A family-values far-right conservative named David Vitter appears headed for victory on Tuesday in the U.S. Senate race in Louisiana…. He presents himself as a morally righteous, clean-cut family man, and his wife and three young children have become virtual campaign props.

As for Vitter’s background, she noted:

In Congress, Vitter became a reliable vote for the extreme right, earning a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union in 2002. He vowed to outlaw abortion in almost all cases, even when pregnancy results from rape or incest; his only exception was to save the life of the mother. And—with an eye on the governor’s office—he continued the crusade against gambling that he’d started in 1993 with the ethics complaint against Gov. Edwin Edwards.

But most amazing of all is this charming incident that occurred back in 1999, when Bill Clinton’s adultery was on the minds of all righteous Southern Republican Christian Values Voters:

As Vitter geared up in 2002 to run for governor, his bitter race against Treen came back to haunt him. A Treen supporter, local Republican Party official Vincent Bruno, blurted out on a radio show that he believed Vitter had once had an extramarital affair.

The
Louisiana Weekly
newspaper followed up. Bruno told the paper that
the young woman had contacted the Treen campaign in 1999 because she was upset that Vitter was portraying himself as a family-values conservative and trotting out his wife and children for campaign photo ops.
Bruno, who declined to comment for this story, and John Treen interviewed the woman, who said she had worked under the name “Leah.”

But
after nearly a year of regular paid assignations with Vitter,
the lawmaker asked her to divulge her real name, according to Treen, citing the account he said she gave him. Her name was Wendy Cortez, Treen said. She said Vitter’s response was electric. “He said, ‘Oh, my God! I can’t see you anymore,’” John Treen told me, citing the woman’s account to him and noting that Vitter’s wife is also named Wendy. And Wendy Vitter does not appear to be the indulgent type.

Asked by an interviewer in 2000 whether she could forgive her husband if she learned he’d had an extramarital affair, as Hillary Clinton and Bob Livingston’s wife had done, Wendy Vitter told the
Times-Picayune:
“I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”

Jacoby also noted this in her article:

Vitter, Bruno and others interviewed the alleged prostitute several times in 1999. She also met with a respected local television reporter, Richard Angelico, the
Louisiana Weekly
said. But Angelico declined to run with the story after she would not agree to go on camera, the paper said. Vitter denied the allegations.

But shortly before the
Louisiana Weekly
was set to publish its story, he dropped out of the governor’s race, saying he needed to deal with marital problems. “Our [marriage] counseling sessions have…led us to the rather obvious conclusion that it’s not time to run for governor,” Vitter said at the time.

So, to recap: In Louisiana, Vitter carried on a yearlong affair with a prostitute in 1999. Then he ran for the House as a hard-core social conservative, traipsing around with his wife and kids as props, leading the public crusade in defense of traditional marriage.

Once in Washington, he became a client of Madame Deborah Palfrey’s “escort service,” even as he announced that amending the Constitution to protect traditional marriage was the most important political priority the country faces. People such as Rush Limbaugh, Fred Thompson, and Newt Gingrich—with their second, third, and fourth wives in tow—supported the same amendment.

Revealingly, while Senate Republicans demanded that Larry Craig resign his Senate seat in the wake of his gay bathroom sex scandal—claiming that their doing so showed their fervent belief in the need for high moral standards for elected officials—they did nothing of the kind with regard to Vitter. Quite the contrary, they vigorously supported Vitter. In the midst of the Craig scandal, as Republicans were demanding Craig’s resignation,
Roll Call
’s Emily Heil appeared on MSNBC and reported:

If you look at David Vitter, I couldn’t find anyone to talk to me about him in the days after his scandal. No one would talk to me about it—they said this is a private matter, this is a family member.
And when [Vitter] eventually met with Republicans behind closed doors, they gave him a hearty round of applause,
as I was told. I don’t think Senator Craig is going to get that kind of reception.

That report was consistent with articles in the immediate aftermath of the Vitter disclosures, such as one from Louisiana’s
News Star
titled “GOP Leaders Support Vitter”:

Republican leaders generally are circling the wagons around embattled U.S. Sen. David Vitter, Louisiana Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere said Thursday.

“The consensus is they don’t want him to resign,” Villere said after spending hours in phone consultation with Republicans for the past three days.

What wretched and transparent hypocrisy. If Craig had resigned, his replacement would have been chosen by the Republican governor of Idaho, but Vitter’s replacement would be selected by Louisiana’s Democratic governor. Moreover, Vitter’s adultery was merely of the heterosexual (albeit illegal, prostitute-hiring) variety, whereas Craig attempted to have sex with a man. Hence, Senate Republicans sought to push Craig out while protecting Vitter. One would think we could at least dispense with the fiction that the Moral Values Senate caucus trying to oust Larry Craig was motivated by anything resembling actual principles, in view of the fact that it was simultaneously giving rousing applause to David Vitter.

It goes without saying that no gay candidate would stand a chance of receiving the presidential nomination from the party that stands for traditional marriage. Indeed, the Idaho Family Values Association, in the wake of the Larry Craig scandal, issued a statement calling—explicitly—for the GOP to purge all gay politicians from the party:

The Party, in the wake of the Mark Foley incident in particular, can no longer straddle the fence on the issue of homosexual behavior. Even setting Senator Craig’s situation aside,
the Party should regard participation in the self-destructive homosexual lifestyle as incompatible with public service on behalf of the GOP.

But they would never call for excluding political figures who dumped their wives and are on their second or third marriages—actions at least as deviant from principles of traditional marriage as anything Senator Craig did—because so many of their pious supporters engage in the same behavior, as Idaho’s traditionally high divorce rates demonstrate. Indeed, statistics compiled by the Nationwide Center for Health Statistics have long placed Idaho in the top 10 of the highest divorce rates nationwide—along with such gay-marriage-banning states as Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, and Wyoming. These righteous crusaders for “moral principles” apply their dictates only when there is political gain to be had, and routinely overlook, suspend, and violate these “principles” to ensure that their leaders and followers are never limited in their own behavior.

Beyond this, a virtual army of prominent GOP Values Voters leaders—who parade around as Paragons of Traditional Marriage Virtue and who unceasingly attempt to pass or enforce laws to coerce moral behavior and punish those who deviate—were exposed as wallowing in the sleazy mire of Foley, Craig, and Vitter.
In just a one-year period beginning in November 2006,
the nation was subjected to these GOP moral leaders:

• Social conservative televangelist Ted Haggard (bought crystal methamphetamine from the male prostitutes he hired for sex)

• GOP Washington State representative Richard Curtis (was involved in a payment dispute with a male prostitute he met in a gay bookstore while wearing women’s undergarments)

• Giuliani campaign co-chair for South Carolina and state treasurer Thomas Ravenel (arrested for cocaine trafficking)

• McCain campaign co-chair for Florida, GOP state representative Bob Allen (arrested for paying $20 to a male undercover officer for oral sex in a Titusville city park)

• Pro-war and anti-gay-rights pundit Matt Sanchez (exposed as a former gay prostitute and porn star)

• Right-wing Denver talk-radio host Scott Eller Cortelyou (arrested on suspicion of using the Internet to lure a child into a sexual relationship)

• Former GOP South Dakota representative Ted A. Klaudt (arrested on charges of rape and other offenses against two girls who were his foster children)

• Michael Flory, head of the Michigan Federation of Young Republicans and speaker at the 1992 Republican National Convention (pleaded guilty to sexual battery for abusing a twenty-two-year-old fellow member during a Federation of Young Republicans national convention; when he was falsely denying the accusations, Flory—according to the prosecutor—had “been running around telling everybody what a piece of trash [the victim] is”)

• Glenn Murphy, chairman of Indiana’s Clark County Republican Party and the Young Republican National Federation (resigned in the wake of a criminal investigation alleging that the thirty-three-year-old social conservative performed unwanted oral sex on a sleeping twenty-two-year-old male relative)

• Defense contractor Brent Wilkes (convicted of bribing the married, GOP Family Values congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, now a convicted felon himself, with cash and prostitutes)