Sometime next week, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert is due to be sentenced for illegally concealing $1.7 million in payments to a former member of Hastert’s high school wrestling teams. Prosecutors believe the man, known only as “Individual A,” is one of many that Hastert molested over 50 years. Incredibly, some 41 people have written federal judge Thomas Durkin arguing that Hastert isn’t such an evil guy after all, and deserves a break.
Read the letters here. Notice who appears on page 25? Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who was nominally one of Hastert’s top lieutenants for most of Hastert’s speakership. I say “nominally” because while Hastert was the leader of the House Republicans during his tenure as Speaker, it was no secret that DeLay held the real power from 2003 to 2006.
Hands down, DeLay’s letter is the most maudlin of all. He praises Hastert as “a man of strong faith” who “loves and respects his fellow man.” DeLay goes on to say that Hastert is far from the evil man portrayed by federal prosecutors, but “a good man who loves the Lord” and “doesn’t deserve what he’s going through.”
When Brian Tashman of People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch found this, he took a peek in the Right Wing Watch archives and discovered that DeLay sung a very different tune just a few months after the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land. Last summer, DeLay appeared on Steve Malzberg’s show on Newsmax TV, where he has a semi-regular gig as a commentator, to discuss the decision. PFAW got a clip.
DeLay claimed that the ink had barely dried on the decision when the Justice Department drew up “a secret memo” that would make “12 new perversions” legal–including “having sex with little boys.” Malzberg ate it up, saying that after the Supremes decided to strike down constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, “absolutely nothing would surprise me.” DeLay was speaking in code. This is a new twist on an old religious right canard–“Homosexuals don’t reproduce, they recruit!” Lest you think this is too outlandish even for Newsmax, watch the whole thing here. The exchange about the secret memo begins at around the 3-minute mark.
So let’s see if we’ve got this right. DeLay thinks that gays were given carte blanche to engage in evil “perversions” last summer. But when an actual pedophile is about to face the music, DeLay thinks the judge should go easy on him because he’s “a man of strong faith”? Even by DeLay’s standards, this is nauseating.
When I first started blogging more than a decade ago at Daily Kos–where, for those who don’t know, I’m the artist known as Christian Dem in NC–one of the first sayings I picked up was “IOKIYAR,” or “It’s OK if you’re a Republican.” After seeing this leap from DeLay, that phrase suddenly takes on a new–and grotesque–meaning.
