The tendency of many Texas districts to elect anyone, no matter how obviously embarrassing, to Congress so long as he has an “R” by his name, strikes again. This time, it’s Rep. Blake Farenthold, out of Corpus Christi, who is being sued by former communications staffer Lauren Greene for sexual harassment. The details of the lawsuit are just what you’d hope they’d be when considering a conservative Texas congressman who had a prior career as a Rush Limbaugh wannabe at a local talk radio station: Heavy drinking leading to harassing women at parties, hitting women up for pity sex by trotting out the “my wife won’t sleep with me” line, bragging that a lobbyist tapped him for a threesome. Greene-specific leering accusations include suggesting she had semen on her skirt, telling her he had “wet dreams” about her and talking about her nipples.
These stories are still firmly in the “allegations” category; still, Farenthold’s comfort with lewdness and leering at women is evident from this picture of him in duck pajamas posing with lingerie models. But while Farenthold is inarguably comfortable being around sexed-up women and is alleged to be highly interested in committing adultery, when it comes to the basic health care women need in order to have all that sex safely and healthily, Farenthold, citing his strong Catholic values, cannot stand for it.
Farenthold has a long anti-abortion record, sponsoring a bill that would ban abortion at the federal level and voting for a bill that would ban women from using their own insurance plans to cover abortion. He’s not particularly keen on contraception, either, co-sponsoring a bill that would ban Planned Parenthood from getting federal funding for contraception provision. When Hobby Lobby won their Supreme Court case, giving them the right to deny contraception coverage to employees, lingerie-loving but contraception-sour Farenthold celebrated on Facebook.
It’s a story that gets told over and over in many ways and in many forms over the years: Conservatives who get high and mighty about the sexual choices of others, while using that same sexual freedom in order to have some fun of their own. And, since most of them aren’t hitting up post-menopausal women, we can guess they’re relying on the same reproductive technologies they denounce in the daylight to do so without baby-making. After all, the only love child to be produced in a political sex scandal, in my lifetime at least, was born to a pro-choice Democrat. Newt Gingrich, David Vitter, John Ensign: All eager to tell you that you have to live with the “consequences” of having sex, all eager to avoid those consequences themselves. Scott DesJarlais is opposed to abortion, except when he wanted his mistress to get one. Hell, the author of one of the most enduring bits of anti-abortion legislation, the Hyde Amendment—and who went hard after President Clinton for adultery—had been having an affair just a few short years before he decided that women on Medicaid should not be able to say no to giving birth if they accidentally get pregnant.
How do these guys compartmentalize like this? There’s a temptation to call all this “hypocrisy” and leave it at that, but really, it happens so often and so egregiously that the word “hypocrisy” doesn’t seem to encompass all that is going on here. Really, what we’re seeing is an inability to even consider the internal lives, needs, and wants of women. Certainly, the past couple of years have exposed how many prominent conservative men who feel entitled to shame and stigmatize women for using contraception inadvertently reveal, at the very same time, that they have no idea how contraception works or how central it is to the life of nearly every single woman who has ever had intercourse, ever. Putting two and two together—realizing that female sexual accessibility that you want to enjoy requires women having access to reproductive health care—requires giving women minimal consideration as people, as opposed to just bodies in skirts for you to leer at. And once again we’re reminded how many conservative men just don’t want to go there.
Amanda Marcotte is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about liberal politics, the religious right and reproductive health care. She’s a prolific Twitter villian who can be followed @amandamarcotte.
