Perverts in the Senate

 

Honestly, when I saw the story of the sex tape filmed in the Senate, I was a little confused. I thought, how could a crew get in there to film it, even guerilla style? Having worked there, I know you can get away with a lot, but this seemed like a bit much. As more details emerged, the story became clearer and those questions were replaced by other ones. Ultimately, the whole thing is just another symptom of how far the country has fallen and how rotten our culture has gotten. If you’ve been paying attention to the world around us, and you’re being honest with yourself, is it any wonder a Senate staffer would in a hearing room what the government has been doing to all of us for decades?

It doesn’t matter that the sex was between two men, what matters is what the whole thing exemplifies. There has been a lot of sexual activity in the United States Capitol Building, I can assure – straight, gay, and a whole bunch of things in between. Ted Kennedy served there for decades, for crying out loud. 

And there still is. 

Hell, in 1983 there was a scandal involving two Members of the House of Representatives – Republican Dan Crane and Democrat Gerry Studds – having sex with 17-year-old House Pages. A Page is akin to an intern, though they’re generally high school students spending time in DC being errand runners for Members. You see them sitting around the well of the House, waiting for someone to give them orders. It’s a relic from a time long gone and should probably be ended. That it survived the 1983 scandal is a testament to just how entrenched in the Capitol culture they are.

Anyway, since the age of consent in DC was 16 (let that sink in), both Crane and Studds were admonished but not expelled. Crane, who’d had sex with a 17-year-old female page, was tossed by Republican voters in 1984, but Democrats kept sending Studds, who was gay and whose partner was a 17-year-old male, to Washington until he retired in 1997, because why not? 

When you hear Democrats talk about how standards have deteriorated, please remember they did not expel Gerry Studds, even though they held a large majority in the House. 

And again, there have been quite a few Kennedy’s who served there, so it’s never really been treated as a nunnery. 

What’s new, and a sign of our further cultural demise, is the filming of it. It was not a professional crew shooting a porno movie on the quick, it’s was the participants filming themselves, posing for pictures with no ambiguity that both knew what was happening. 

Filming it is one thing, I guess, but then it was shared with others online. I’ve never been an exhibitionist, I didn’t need to film most aspects of my life – I was there, I saw it live and remember it. No one who wasn’t there needs to see most of what has happened in anyone’s lives, so I didn’t even ever try to capture most of it. 

Now, in a world where follower count is someone’s most marketable skillset, filming everything is almost required. Sharing it is too.

I still find it odd that the guy was hired to begin with. He wasn’t discrete. Who hires a guy who posted sexually explicit pictures of himself all over his social media manage to get a job there in the first place? Did no one do a simple Internet search during the hiring process? (The answer is: Democrats have no standards, and this will soon be a requirement for being hired by them anyway, so this guy was just ahead of the curve.)

A gay friend of mine tells me this is not uncommon in gay circles, especially with younger gay men. So much of their existence is tied to getting laid, he says, that conventional is boring. “Everyone is looking for the next rush, the next thing to shock,” he says. This was just a part of that.

Add to that the fact that young people are incredibly stupid and you get a recipe for what happened. 

These are people who post pictures of every meal they eat, because if you didn’t at least try to make someone jealous of what your ordered at an expensive restaurant, did you really enjoy it? Sex and exhibitionism are the same thing. I mean, these people post pictures of their vacations while they’re on them, essentially inviting someone to break into their homes. You’re not dealing with fully developed brains here.

A lot of people have fooled around in their offices, few have filmed it. Fewer still have shared those videos with others and gotten caught. This guy in the Senate isn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. There are perverts everywhere, why would anyone think the Senate would be different?