Sauce for the goose

Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Ron DeSantis and their Ubergruppenfűhrers are so busy prying into other people’s private lives that I think it’s only fair we pry into theirs.

Well? Sauce for the goose …

Rabid Republican wolves are in howling pursuit of strangers who have done them no harm, with the intent to further injure them. Christians, my ass.

Perhaps the saddest domestic story of the year was Texas Republicans’ bloodthirsty pursuit of Kate Cox, to force her to bear a child who was fatally crippled in the womb. They drove her out of Texas.

Not “drove her” in the sense of driving a car. But worry not: the Inquisition, I mean City Council, of Amarillo hath proposed making it a crime to drive anyone over city streets on the way to an abortion.

How Amarillo would enforce this, or why, without massive intrusion on civil liberties, and waste of millions of dollars in public money, I have no idea. Nor does the Amarillo City Inquisition.

What about a cab driver who takes a young family to the Amarillo airport, for reasons the cabbie knows not? Bust him too? Throw him in jail? For what?

Should he have to ask, before he accepts her carfare, if she’s on the way to get an abortion? And if she says yes, must he ask for her name and number and fingerprint?

Doesn’t the Republican Party claim to be against “intrusive government regulation”?

And speaking of hypocritical bullshit, how about Florida Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler, who allegedly videotaped his sexual assault of a woman with whom he and his wife had previously enjoyed a threesome. The woman claims that Christian raped her after his wife, Bridget, called off their next show-and-don’t-tell time.

Christian’s wife, Bridget, is a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which demands, and has won, book bans in school libraries, particularly if the books mention Negroes or children.

Then a second sex video surfaced, allegedly, of Bridget enjoying herself erotically with a woman — though it’s unclear whether it’s the woman who accused Christian of rape, or of Bridget with a different woman — according to news reports from Sarasota, where Bridget Ziegler is a member of the school board.

Both Zieglers have refused calls to resign from their … umm … positions, for which Christian was paid $120,000 a year, until the Florida Republican Party’s executive committee stripped him of his authority and salary after the news … umm … came out.

Bridget meanwhile stood, or hunkered down, alone as the only member of her school board to vote against kicking her off it. The vote was 4-1.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, who endorsed Bridget in her 2022 school board race, has taken no action against her, and mumbles when asked about it, and the issues involved.

Before Bridget became famous, DeSantis appointed her to the Central Tourism Board, a politburo that the governor-in-high-heels created to wage war against the satanic Disney Company, for its refusal to take action against and fire gay employees.

Take action how? Wouldn’t it be better to turn the other cheek?

OK, this is all old news.

But anyone who can scrape a crumb of fairness from the tin cup they use as a heart should understand why the Zieglers’ home games and DeSantis’s hypocrisy are matters of public interest, given their threats against others, and their contributions to the destruction of the careers and daily lives of people with the horrifying, terroristic job of being a school librarian, and the lives of the librarians’ children.

I don’t know why Republicans, such as the five I have named here, have such a deep interest in other people’s private sexual behavior. Surely it must involve an abiding, rather creepy, interest in the behavior itself.

I, myself, would not spend hundreds and thousands of hours poring over a subject I find repellent. So why do they do it — unless they do not really find it repellent at all? Unless they’re drawn to it, like a blind moth to a dim light they can sense but dare not touch?

You know why they do it as well as I do. They do it because they seek political office: the power to boss people around; to get their name and picture in the paper; to think themselves better than they know they are; to strut about in the name of their presumed religion by disparaging people they know nothing about; to swagger in front of their neighbors, behind the backs of millions of people far away, whom they will never meet, and whom they do not care if they injure again, or whether they live or die.

This being the case — the relentless pursuit of strangers who have done them no harm — isn’t it fair that we, the powerless, be allowed to turn the tables on the Republican hypocrites (Matthew 23) and ask what these persecutors get up to in private, in their committees and covens?

After all, we pay their salaries. They hold the whip hand over us. And use it.

Shouldn’t they too be subjected to the whips they yield: intrusion into their private lives; fear of punishment; the shame of obloquy and disgrace; fear of prison for private actions that are nobody else’s business?

Sauce for the goose …

Wouldn’t it be fair if we require Messrs. Abbott, Paxton, DeSantis and their fellow inquisitors to answer a few questions if they want to run for office? For instance:

Have you ever participated in any form of sexual behavior that the average hypocrite might call “nonstandard”?

Have you ever performed any sexual act, behind closed doors, that you have publicly condemned?

If so: Why? Where did you hear about it, and learn to do it: From a book?

Where did you get the book?

Is this any of my business? No.

Would the public like to know? Probably.

And isn’t your job to serve the public?

Not to service us: to serve us.

(Courthouse News columnist Robert Kahn considers himself innocent.)

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